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In November 1986 I visited SunYatSen University and gave a public lecture about Urban Modelling. China was a very different world then: no cars, no computers, no email, barely functioning electricity. And of course it was before laptops, networks, hand-held devices and so on. The personal computer had only just been invented. The campus was more or less in the countryside. Despite the modernising reformsÌýinitiated inÌýtheÌýcountryÌýin the late 1970s, this was still the old China.

Fast forward 31 years to 2017. The University is now a power house, in the top 10 in China and advancing in the QS university rankings worldwide very rapidly.ÌýI have been there a number of times since 1986 but hadÌýnot given anyÌýpublic lectures until April of this year - when I more or less repeated what I had talked about 31 years ago! Well not quite, of course; it was the same domain of interestÌý– but I talked aboutÌý;ÌýÌýand so on. A world away from those distant years but closely linked intellectually.

There are no faculty left working in the School of Geography and Planning from that timeÌýbut this is not unusual because there is no one left in any of the universities I have worked in who goes back beyond 1990. It is a little sad that of those who were students then - some nowÌýsenior faculty -Ìýnone could remember attending my lecture and I am sure they did not know of it despite the fact thatÌýthere were about 130 people in the room at the time. I found the building I had lectured in largely because of the poster belowÌýwhich was hand painted for my 1986 visit. Those of you who are Chinese will be able to read this:

Fulong Wu and his colleagues from theÌýBartlett School of PlanningÌýtogether withÌýÌýand several sponsors () Ìýran a great meeting on Friday and Saturday 5-6 May at ×î×¼µÄÁùºÏ²ÊÂÛ̳ which gathered together some 200 researchers and academics studying urban development in China in all its aspects. TheÌýÌýcontains the programme and a variety of contributions from Zipf’s law for Chinese cities to notions about state intervention and the crisis of debt pervading China’s cities and economies.

Conscious of the fact that I have spent 7 weeks in Hong Kong so far this year, where I have spokenÌýabout smart cities many times to groups at HCUHK, HKU and PolyU as well as atÌý, I contributed a short talk on a key issue concerningÌýsmart cities in China, making the point that apart fromÌýcultural and economic differences which pervade all global comparisons of cities, the development of new IT in Chinese cities is not so different from cities in the west in general and the UK in particular. Bigger phones exist inÌýChina, more people (almost everyone) use them on the subways but the same old problems of implementing top-down plans to implement new IT in cities are the same everywhere. The experience to date of such large-scale corporate ventures has not been good in the west and I expect it will be no better in China.

It isÌýhard, many IT plans fail but cities in China and elsewhere are built largely from the bottom up – they are complex systems – and the question of how we deploy new technologies is really the driving force of smart cities;Ìýin fact the driving force of the city in all its manifestations.

For the PDFs of the presentations given by Professor Batty, see spatialcomplexity.info