This paper analyzes a recent American report "Technology and Future of Cities" and reflects on China's smart city development. The key areas covered in the report are transportation, energy, buildings and housing, water, urban farming, and urban manufacturing. The report emphasizes smart city development as an ongoing process. In China, smart city development has taken off very rapidly in many cities. However, there have been some cases of redundant and mismanaged projects. Sharing the experience in the report, we suggest the followings. China's smart city development in the future should pay more attention to the application of technologies in focused areas which have the highest potential to improve people's quality of life; a national platform should be developed to provide big data and accelerate the formulation of regulations on common data format, data sharing and privacy protection; smart city should be understood as a continual process of experiments of uncertainty so as to allow room for testing completely new ideas;. and smart city development should be fully supported, guided and coordinated by the central government.

smart city  /  technology and future cities  /  urbanization  /  informatization