At least two days every week, Zhang Shiqing walks along the shores of the Queen's Bay in Sanya, a tourist hotspot in south China's Hainan Province, to collect garbage from the beach. "It takes at least three hours to make the six-kilometer trip down and back," she said.
Queen's Bay is located near Tenghai Community, also known as Houhai. It is a favorite tourist destination and a pilot community for building Sanya into a "plastic smart city." As the women's affairs director of the Tenghai Community Committee, Zhang has actively participated in the community's regular activities to remove garbage from the beach and reduce plastic pollutants. On November 21, 2021, Sanya organized a fourth quarter beach cleaning as part of its "Plastic Smart Cities" demonstration project. Within one hour, 314.4 kilograms of garbage were removed including 210 kilograms of plastic waste, accounting for 70 percent of all the garbage.
A new study from Juniper Research has selected Shanghai as the leading smart city in Asia in 2023.
The top 5 smart cities ranked by Juniper Research are:
- Shanghai
- Seoul
- Shenzhen
- Sydney
- Beijing
Juniper Research’s ranking of 50 world cities is based on an evaluation of many different smart city aspects, covering transportation and infrastructure, energy and lighting, city management and technology, and urban connectivity.
The degree of urbanization worldwide reached 57 percent last year, indicating more people are living in cities and other urban settings than in rural areas. Cities are very important to human activity and economic development, but at the same time they are more vulnerable to heat waves, floods and other weather-related disasters.
Urbanization often results in intensified land surface warming in and around cities and towns. Combined with that, the urban heat island effect causes the mercury to rise higher in cities than in suburban and rural areas. And the fact that air conditioners in cities and towns continuously spew heat during the summer months exacerbates the urban heat island effect, which in turn makes cities hotter than rural areas.
The degree of urbanization worldwide reached 57 percent last year, indicating that more people are living in cities and other urban settings than in rural areas. Cities are very important to human activity and economic development, but at the same time they are more vulnerable to heat waves, floods and other weather-related disasters.
Urbanization often results in intensified land surface warming in and around cities and towns. Combined with that, the urban heat island effect causes the mercury to rise higher in cities than in suburban and rural areas. And the fact that air conditioners in cities and towns continuously spew heat during the summer months exacerbates the urban heat island effect, which in turn makes cities hotter than rural areas.
Read more: CN: Smart cities can be more resilient to climate change
According to a World Bank analysis back in 2000, the larger the urban population, the more prosperous the economy and the higher personal income would be.
The analysis is still true today. A study last year by an Indian government think tank and the Asian Development Bank found that after accounting for factors such as age, gender, education, type of worker (i.e. regular versus casual), industry, and more, in 2011, the average monthly income of full-time salaried workers in India's cities with 1.5 million or more inhabitants was, on average, 16% higher than in small cities and about 36% higher than in rural areas.