Sustainability 2015, 7, 7604-7621; doi:10.3390/su7067604 OPEN ACCESS sustainability ISSN 2071-1050 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Article The Performance of the Smart Cities in China—A Comparative Study by Means of Self-Organizing Maps and Social Networks Analysis Dong Lu 1, Ye Tian 2, Vincent Y. Liu 3,* and Yi Zhang 4 1 School of Business, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu 610101, China; E-Mail:
[email protected] 2 School of Economics and Management, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China; E-Mail:
[email protected] 3 School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau 4 Department of Mathematics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China; E-Mail:
[email protected] * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel.: +853-8897-2862. Academic Editor: Marc A. Rosen Received: 3 November 2014 / Accepted: 2 June 2015 / Published: 12 June 2015 Abstract: Smart cities link the city services, citizens, resource and infrastructures together and form the heart of the modern society. As a “smart” ecosystem, smart cities focus on sustainable growth, efficiency, productivity and environmentally friendly development. By comparing with the European Union, North America and other countries, smart cities in China are still in the preliminary stage. This study offers a comparative analysis of ten smart cities in China on the basis of an extensive database covering two time periods: 2005–2007 and 2008–2010. The unsupervised computational neural network self-organizing map (SOM) analysis is adopted to map out the various cities based on their performance.