Recently, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has released a list of national pilot smart cities in 2013, Yichang is right in the list. It is learnt from the Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development that smart cities are under the supporting of a new generation of the information technology like Internet of Things and Cloud Computing, forming a new informationalized city morphology. Through construction period from three to five years, Yichang, a pilot smart city, is to systematically promote 11 smart projects, such as comprehensive service platform, promotion and deepening of citizen cards and so on.

　　On April 17, the Report of Yichang Applying for Constructing Smart City was submitted to the Municipal Government by the Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and then approved by the leaders of Municipal Government on April 26. The commission assisted the government offices to organize 18 relevant units in the whole city to write a planning outline for Yichang being a smart city on May 17. And the outline highlighted the overall direction of building the modern megacity and also enriched and completed the construction contents with Yichang characteristic such as hydroelectric tourism city in the world, Three Gorges Cloud Computing Center and Three Gorges Logistics Park, emphasizing the innovation contents like systematizing the planning, construction and city management in the urbanization construction and highlighting the characteristics of constructing smart Yichang. In July, with a comprehensive review, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development determined Yichang as a national pilot smart city.

　　Constructing the smart city is an integral part of Yichang development strategies of building the modern megacity, which can get more comprehensive, dynamic, exact data to develop more flexible and convenient service for citizens. There are totally 11 key projects, such as (1) Constructing information resource database for smart Yichang; (2) Constructing comprehensive service platform for smart Yichang; (3) Constructing Three Gorges Cloud Computing Center and the cloud of e-government affairs; (4) Promotion and deepening project of citizen cards; (5) Promotion and deepening project of web pages for citizens; (6) Construction project of intelligent transportation; (7) Emergency Command and Dispatch Center; (8) Improvement of smart abilities of city’s planning, construction and management; (9) Construction project of smart travelling; (10) Demonstration project of smart parks; (11) Safety & supervision construction of comprehensive service platform.   (Reporter Zhao Wei, Correspondent Chen Feng , Intern Huan Senyuan)