Digital City Shanghai: Concepts, Foundations, and Current State

The fastest developing city in China is Shanghai; its annual growth rate (GDP) exceeded 11.9% average in every year from 1992 and GDP per person in 2003 reached 4909 USD. Economists, industries and the government have been considering how to keep Shanghai developing in a sustainable manner. In 1994, the Shanghai Municipal Government put forward the concept of “information harbor” and set the goal of establishing a series of information infrastructures in the following five years. The Shanghai city informatization project started in 1999, and by the end of 2001 it had spread across Shanghai. At the same time, some applications based on Internet technologies were designed and developed. In the beginning of 2002, based on the current information infrastructures and systems, Shanghai Municipal Government announced the “Digital City Shanghai” strategy. This chapter will introduce the background of the Digital City Shanghai project, the current state of the information infrastructure in Shanghai, and the concept of system design & user interface. The Digital City Shanghai project will be described in four parts: Spatial Data Infrastructure, City Informatization, Shanghai City Grid, and Shanghai Logistics Information Platform. We will also introduce some research projects. In addition to the strategy, we describe and discuss social perspective