Wanxiang Innova City (Hangzhou - China)

Wanxiang is working on the construction of a mega-city called Innova City. It will be built from scratch on the river bank in Hangzhou, capital of the Zhejiang Province, which is adjacent to Shangai. Hangzhou is the upcoming Tier 1 city in China, and it is also the city of choice for a lot of companies to locate their headquarters. Hangzhou, like Shangai, is divided in two parts by the river Qiantang. The old town is located north of the river, and the new town is located south of the river. In the future, if one looks at the centre of the inner ring of Hangzhou, at the heart of Greater Hangzhou Bay Area, that is where Innova City is going to be built. Along the river, adjacent to the Asian Games and the G20 facilities. With about 10 square kilometres, and a residential population of 90,000, this will be a mixed-use smart city with three main areas. One will be focused on ecologically friendly smart manufacturing. The second area will be a global forward-looking research and development zone, where they are in the process of building two leading edge research institutes. At its core, one will have research centres and labs to work on areas like renewable energies, smart cities, industrial internet, and advanced manufacturing. This will be the brain of the high value-added industry. In the third area, an ambitious smart city residential zone will be built. The area of this zone will be about 1,100 acres, and 45% of the surface area will be green. Facilities for interactive exchange will also be built. Wanxiang Group and the local government will co-operate the city in partnership.

Innova City is dedicated to new energies and smart city innovations, and it will be the main theatre for the deployment of blockchain application scenarios. Wanxiang Group plans to invest 28 Billion US dollars over the next 7 years in this ambitious project.

The city’s development will be done in three dimensions. The first one is physical infrastructure (buildings), the second one is data infrastructure, and the third one is communication infrastructure. Buildings will require a huge number of smart features to be built into them. The piping infrastructure will integrate an extensive low-maintenance sensor network, to allow easy implementation of a data layer on top of it. From the beginning, the whole process will be conducted in co-development with leading universities and agencies around the world. Conceived in partnership with a leading US University, Innova City will have a Behaviour Economics Lab, which will help to address the social and psychological aspects of the urban planning and development of the city's infrastructure: the foot paths, the location of the greenery, the types of trees that will be planted, etc.

In 2018, an international competition for forward-looking ideas for smart city development, in a holistic perspective that covers various aspects. In the meanwhile, construction of the smart factory side might begin.

Sources:

Interview with Vincent Y. Wang from Wanxiang Group at the Smart City Expo World Congress Barcelona 2017.