1.1 Smart City, Smart Country, and Smart Earth
With the continuous process of urbanization, the ubiquity of information technology has profoundly influenced people's daily life. Driven by local governments and businesses, city informatization process starts from digitalization, followed by the wide popularity of network infrastructure, and has realized the development of the network. Although smart construction is still in its infancy, countries around the world continue to carry out the smart city construction practice and will gradually push smart development into a new stage.
In 2004, South Korea and Japan launched national strategic plans of U-Korea and U-Japan respectively. Subsequently, the EU developed a framework for the development of smart cities. Singapore has developed from a “smart city” to a “smart country” through a decade-long blueprint for the development of the communication and information industry. IBM proposed a smart earth idea in the United States. In early 2009, the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama held a round-table conference with U.S. business leaders. IBM took the opportunity to explain the concept of a “smart earth”. Since then, many countries in the world have put forward their own plans of smart development. In September 2009, Dubuque, Iowa, announced with IBM that it would build “America's first smart city,” a community of 60,000 people. In 2010, the US federal communications commission (FCC) announced its 10-year high-speed broadband development program to increase the speed by 25 times (Harrison et al. 2010).
In China, cities such as Shanghai and Nanjing formulated smart city plans in 2011. In November 2012, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development promulgated the interim measures for the administration of national smart city pilot projects, which elevated smart city to the national level policy. In January 2012, the first batch of 90 pilot cities were approved. In July 2013, the China Electronics Standardization Institute released the white paper on standardization of smart cities in China. In order to guide the orderly development of smart cities, the state has introduced relevant policies intensively. The outline of China's 13th Five-year Plan clearly calls for “building a number of new model smart cities”. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has also proposed to organize 100 cities to carry out “pilot projects” of new smart cities during the period. Multiple ministries have jointly made a smart city standard system comprising seven categories. With the widespread construction of urban information infrastructure in China, there are some improvements in urban management and public services.