The Historical Changes and Evolutionary Logic of China's Smart City Development Policies

With the development of modern high and new technologies such as the Internet, the trend of urban intelligence is obvious. Smart city construction has become an important way for cities to carry out high-quality development and an important carrier for the construction of digital China. From the perspective of historical institutionalism, the development policies of smart cities in China have gone through three stages: exploratory development, active promotion, and strategic deepening. The policy evolution of smart cities is analyzed based on structural logic and is influenced by the comprehensive factors of economic environment, development philosophy, and technological level; According to historical logic analysis, it exhibits obvious path dependence characteristics under the influence of factors such as coordination effect, learning effect, and adaptive expectations, as well as key nodes for policy transformation; The transformation of public demands, rational government choices, and collaborative efforts between government and enterprises collectively constitute the driving force for policy change. Looking ahead to the future, China's smart city development policies need to improve laws and regulations, break away from path dependence, and truly promote the improvement of urban governance capabilities and levels.