In the past few decades, China's cities have experienced a period of rapid development. Great changes have taken place in both urban space and urban life. With the booming of information and communications technology (ICT), ‘Big data’ such as mobile phone signaling, public transportation smart card records and ‘open data’ from commercial websites and government websites jointly promote the formation of the ‘new data environment’, thus providing a novel perspective for a better understanding of what changes have happened or are happening in China’s cities.

This course combines both the new data generated for urban analysis and its research applications. The content ranges from big data acquisition, analysis, visualization and applications in the context of China’s urbanization and its city planning, to urban modeling methods and typical models, as well as the emerging trend and potential revolution of big data in urban planning.

We have categorized the overall content of this online course into five sections, namely, overview, data, data processing, application, and perspective. The section of overview introduces cities in transition and describe the changing of urban space and urban life in China. The second section lists some commonly used open data and big data in the ‘new data environment’. Then, methods for data acquisition, cleaning and analysis are illustrated in data processing section. To better explain the data analysis method, the fourth part introduces several Chinese research cases to illustrate the application of these methods in urban research. Last but not least, the last section is the most future-oriented one, which is composed of some methodologies and proposals such as Data Augmented Design (DAD) and Big Model.

This course, which shares experiences on big data analysis and its research application, will suit those concerning contemporary urbanizing China and its urban planning in the context of information and communication technologies.