Hangzhou's digital urban management system turns 15

Digital urban management has changed people’s lives significantly in Hangzhou over the past 15 years, as things like applying for dog permits and paying parking fees can be done on cellphones, and a broken manhole cover can be fixed within hours.

March 28 marked the 15th anniversary of Hangzhou’s launch of its digital urban management system. During that time, a total of 19.08 million problems had been reported, and 19.02 million of them are solved, with a resolution rate of 99.7 percent.

Through “Tie Xin Cheng Guan,” a local digital urban management app, residents have seen 177,000 issues they reported successfully solved. So far, more than 1.25 million people have registered on the app.

Hangzhou was among the first group of pilot cities that the China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development selected to launch a digital urban management system trial. It was also one of the first pilot cities that passed the trial.

“We’ve introduced third-party monitoring, and more than 1,100 information collectors work in shifts around the clock to cover the 601 grids citywide,” said an official with the Hangzhou Urban Management Bureau. “While efficiently addressing problems concerning urban management, they also greatly reduce operation costs.”

Since its launch in April of 2014, the Tie Xin Cheng Guan app has offered 26 service modules, helping people locate things like parking lots and public lavatories.

In October of 2018, a smart parking system was launched.“

We’ve launched the nation’s first city-level smart parking system that connects to more than 1.3 million parking spaces in Hangzhou,” the bureau official said. “So far, more than 3,500 parking lots with 748,000 parking spaces have provided ‘departure first, payment after’ services with more than 38 million transactions. If each smart parking transaction saves people 30 seconds, the new method has saved a total of 310,000 hours of waiting time.”

At the end of 2020, Hangzhou’s digital urban management system also included outdoor advertisement screens and management items related to urban lighting and garbage sorting.