Data integration as urban transition: regime mediation in Chinese smart urbanism

Source abstract

This paper examines how data integration is assembled and governed in Chinese smart urbanism through a case study of Shijiazhuang's smart transport system. While smart city and urban AI research has shown that digital urban governance is political rather than merely technical, data integration itself has been approached indirectly, as one moment within wider processes of datafication, platformisation, or AI-mediated coordination, rather than as a contested urban process in its own right. We address this gap by asking how data integration should be understood if treated not as a technical fix, but as an urban socio-technical transition process. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2024, including interviews, focus groups, document analysis, and observation, the paper develops a more urban and political reading of the multi-level perspective (MLP). We show that transport data integration was assembled through three interrelated processes: the commensuration of fragmented datasets through coordination and standardization; regime mediation through evaluation, demonstration, and state-market arrangements; and the uneven incorporation of users as visible but weakly empowered actors. The paper's core theoretical contribution is to show that the politics of smart urbanism sits not only in platforms or AI systems, but in the infrastructural work of integration itself.