Chin. Geogra. Sci. 2018 Vol. 28 No. 4 pp. 584–599 Springer Science Press https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-018-0976-0 www.springerlink.com/content/1002-0063 Received date: 2018-01-05; accepted date: 2018-04-30 Foundation item: Under the auspices of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41101548), Philosophy and Social Science Research Program of Heilongjiang Province in 2016 (No. 16JBL01), Key Research Projects of Economic and Social Development in Heilongjiang Province (No. JD2016014), Human Civilization and Social Science Supportive Program for Excellent Young Scholars of Harbin Normal University (No. SYQ2014-06) Correspondent author: WEI Luyao. E-mail: lmyxpeking@163.com; ZHANG Haifeng. E-mail: c.zhang@louisville.edu © Science Press, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Na- ture 2018 Spatial and Temporal Pattern of Urban Smart Development in China and Its Driving Mechanism CHEN Xiaohong 1 , WEI Luyao 1 , ZHANG Haifeng 2 (1. College of Geography Science of Harbin Normal University, Harbin 150025, China; 2. Department of Geography & Geosciences, University of Louisville, Louisville 40292, USA) Abstract: Smart urban development is an inevitable choice, and is essential to overall strength improvement. It is important to explore an urban smart development path which unites smart growth with driving shrinkage perfectly in forming scientific and sustainable de- velopment concept and responding to new normal strategic opportunities. Based on statistic data of 294 prefecture-level cities and above in China from 2000 to 2015, we analyzed spatial and temporal evolution of urban smart development in China by constructing a dy- namic fitting model of urban land expansion, population growth, and economic development as well as the coefficient of variation of urban smart development (CVSD). Further efforts were then made to consider differential distribution regularity of urban smart devel- opment so as to understand the driving mechanisms of heterogeneous classification of urban smart development in China from different scales and scale variation. Our results indicate that: 1) the disordered growth tendency of urban cities in China is overall well controlled in the middle, and late research and it mainly presented a doublet coexistence of shrinkage disordered cities and smart developing cities. It is particularly obvious that Northeast China and East China have regarded shrinkage disordered cities and smart developing cities as main development tendency separately. 2) Areas with basic stability and relative variation were relatively dispersed across the time pe- riod, but the proportion was far beyond areas with significant variation. It demonstrates a relative equilibrium spatial and temporal dif- ferential evolution pattern of prefecture-level cities and above in China, except for Tongling, Lanzhou and Chaoyang. 3) prefecture-level cities and above in China are mostly characterized by shrinkage disordered and smart development classification under the background of different scale and scale variation from 2000–2015; however, the spatial resonance relation is not obvious. 4) There are many interac- tion factors forming an important driving mechanism in developing the spatial and temporal pattern of urban smart development in China, including natural geographical factors, industrial structure adjustment, human capital radiation, regional traffic accessibility, and government decision-making intervention. Keywords: urban smart development; spatial and temporal differential pattern; driving mechanism; interaction factors; China Citation: CHEN Xiaohong, WEI Luyao, ZHANG Haifeng, 2018. Spatial and Temporal Pattern of Urban Smart Development in China and Its Driving Mechanism. Chinese Geographical Science, 28(4): 584–599. https://doi.10.1007/s11769-018-0976-0 1 Introduction Smart development means a synthetic characterization and positive feedback of good coherent match among resource allocation, spatial pattern, and comprehensive performance, and it is a logic reconstruction of eco- nomic new normal development based on the perspec- tive of reasonable stock of land and orderly migration of population. Regional cities have rapidly transformed in recent years (Liu et al., 2015). Several cities have de- veloped a pie-style sprawl along with an increasingly prominent contradiction between people and land,