Along its fast paced economic growth in the last decades, China went through a fast urbaniz-ation process since 1977, going from a mostly rural country to an urban society. While China is not the only emerging economy that went through a fast paced urbanization process, some spec-ificities of the Chinese context lead to unique features and challenges. Perhaps one of the best well known feature of the Chinese economy is the household registration system, hukou, which, by limiting mobility of migrants (both rural-urban and urban-urban), affects agglomeration econ-omies and urban growth. Furthermore, the hukou system, by limiting access to public services for migrants, resulted in a segmented urban labour market, where migrants are at a disadvantage rel-ative to local resident, leading to increased income inequality within cities. Another feature of the Chinese economy that has affected urbanization is the reliance on public investment by both public companies and local governments. This has lead to excess public investment in some cit- ies, leading to appearance of “ghost towns”, and well as a housing bubble in other places. The current investment policy has also affected the urban structure, with some excessively large citi- es,particularly when compared with the next level cities, leading to increasing income inequality across cities and provinces. Demographic changes, driven by the one child policy, will be one of the major challenges that China will face in sustaining economic growth and urbanization. To address these issues, the Chines Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Sci-ence and Technology and Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction have launched pro-jects under several smart cities projects, to make cities more efficient and competitive through the use of technology.