Understanding Smart City Practice in Urban China: A Governance Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

See attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment for the cover letter and point-by-point response to the reviewer.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

-

Author Response

Please see the attachment for the cover letter and detailed response to the reviewer.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

ABSTRACT (line 21)- explain the 3 links between actors and approaches

The article explores through case study analysis the link between the creation of a smart city and aspects of governance and stakeholder engagement.

Interesting as it is, the topic would deserve to be a little more nuanced in its sustainability aspects in order to better adhere to the aims of the journal

1. pls provide a reference source to IBM's 2008
source to the figure - clearly this is your own elaboration but on what data? Specify in the note.
Anticipate already in the introduction what your methodology will be and why you chose these three cities. also indicate what is the added value of the work in terms of possible replicability on other cities, Chinese or otherwise.

2. The literature seems more a deepening of the introduction on the theme of the link between technological aspects in planning. It would be more appreciable to emphasise the contribution made by the authors, at the limit distinguishing according to geographical origin as you have already mentioned so as to specify whether the examples are more or less close to that of the Chinese cities to which you refer. in any case
One cannot fail to mention Giffinger, R., et al., (2007). Smart Cities Ranking of European Medium-Sized Cities (p. 11). Vienna, UT: Centre of Regional Science.
Furthermore, for a reference to the evolution of the term SC over time, see also Boscacci et al., (2014). Smartness and Italian cities. A cluster analysis. TeMA-Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment.

3. This section in particular 3.1 absolutely needs to be rewritten as it is not clear whether you are making hypotheses that you want to test; in this case it should be made explicit from the outset that this is the methodology you intend to use. it is not clear how you analysed the different characteristics and arrived at the choice of three case study cities. Nor is it clear how you hypothesised the link between actors and approaches. Specifically: it is not even clear from the abstract that this is in fact one of the objectives of the work.

4. This section is a description of what happens within the city and could easily be merged with section 3.2. There is a lack of critical reading of the different actions and a greater schematic to follow a similar framework from one case to the next. All this makes it very difficult to distinguish between the different data and actions implemented in the 3 cities. Again, I would rewrite the section with an approach clearly oriented towards the case study methodology, i.e. descriptive and qualitative. However, the critical steps for the demonstration of the hypotheses to be tested should be underlined and in this regard see the suggestion on the explication of such hypotheses in the previous section.

5. This section also deserves restructuring. In particular, first a discussion of the results is proposed and then the conclusions are drawn (I would therefore also revise the title, three to separate the two sections). in particular, it is inadvisable to use tables and figures in the conclusions. the results relating to the discussion on the three cities should be clearly anticipated in the previous section.
Furthermore, if the table is not commented, it is pointless to present it as a result and it deserves to be in the appendix. However, I think it should be commented on more and could easily represent the true result of the reflection of this work. 
Furthermore, the font size should be reduced so that the table fits on a single page, otherwise it becomes difficult to read.

Finally, it is advisable to carefully review both grammar and style especially plurals, subjects, prepositions, etc.

Author Response

Please see the attachment for the cover letter and point-by-point response to the reviewer.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

First of all I would like to thank the authors for following my instructions I find the article very interesting as I have already said and at this point certainly ready to be published provided some minor changes are made.
from a substantive point of view I find it useful in the definition of the first hypothesis in line 103 to better define what is meant by non-linear 
secondly I have a note to make on section 2 which at the moment seems to me more set up as a description of the problems rather than as a real LR which should instead be organised by describing what is said within certain contributions and not as is done in the rest of the article and obviously in the introduction by recalling the references when expressing a concept. 
in section 3 the first lines from 204 to 212 seem more like a result and therefore should not be anticipated; I would put them instead among the results before the analysis of the three cities; it is true that you have hypotheses but then it should be clearly stated that what has been identified has already been expressed by someone beforehand. otherwise, anticipating here the result of your observation certainly does not help to enhance the originality of the work.
Similarly, on page 6 after figure 2, lines 206-232 describe a process that led to the selection of cities that is extremely interesting; I would therefore propose it as a methodological approach instead of simply explaining what has been seen in the literature. By the way, this extensive literature referred to as I said before is not clear where it comes from because this type of analysis does not correspond to how the literature has been presented before.
A final point is on the last section that should be divided into two precisely section 5 with the discussion and section 6 with the conclusions as it is neither usual nor useful in this case to keep them together. 
For the discussion, a little further synthesis work should be done: perhaps it would be worth separating table 2 into 3 parts, alternating the table and the commentary text
Finally, in the conclusions, when suggesting as an example to use Chinese cities, take into account what conditions, if any, under which this can be done, given the size the particularity and possibly the differences with other countries especially if a different economic conditions from those of China 
finally a suggestion perhaps I would not conclude with future research the conclusions which imply a possibility of improvement and therefore the underlining of limitations But I would anticipate them and then conclude with the more specifically policy implications.
Suggestions for future work (FRQ) - page 14 lines 556 lines 561 refer to Smart specialisation while on page 16 when talking about alignement line of 572 the literature on governance and participatory planning should be taken into consideration
I would stress again, even in the implications themselves, the link to sustainability, which is still very little evident, despite the fact that the publication application is in a journal with an unambiguous title.

For the rest minor points are:

all figures should be commented on otherwise they should be deleted Especially if they are maps and not graphs that can provide information on their own 
The source is the authors' elaboration and not the actors themselves 
Insert a dividing line between the different rows of table 1
insert some text between table 1 and figure 2 which must be commented on precisely What does General public mean? 
the source of figure 1 should be reduced If it is necessary to present the data better, specify this by commenting on the figure itself as if putting the information in a note 
Also in a note I would better specify the type of cities expressed in the sentence between lines 82 because in the world the territorial subdivision is extremely different. 


PLs correct some typos such as:

check the adverb thus if appropriate to Line 122

check can+ ing form line 195 check missing parenthesis line 227

check in after like line 264 Maybe the preposition in is missing?
the value is not clear line 337...possibly reduce the number of decimals 
check capitalization in Shanghai in title 4.3 
check repetition lines 478 480 use synonym 
check verb plural line 481
punctuation after approach line 482 
check capital letter after colon in theoretical line 629 and
comma after general line 637 

Author Response

Please see the attachment for the cover letter and detailed response to the reviewer.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf