This guest-edited issue will survey a range of ubiquitous design principles, methods, and practices, with a lens on the particular Chineseness of their consequences, offering cogent speculations on the future of urbanism in China. Urbanisation has been China’s great experiment of the last four decades.  Amidst the unprecedented rapid rate of urban change in China, Chinese cities are now defined as continuously urbanised regions. The complexities of planning and design , monitoring and management, all point to a fundamental reconsideration of how Chinese cities can be conceived, designed, maintained, controlled, and interacted with by stakeholders with Chinese cultural characteristics. At the vast scale of China’s urban landscape, non-human agency is accelerating, through new techniques and processes, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation, rooted in large quantities of data on the behavior of urban citizens interacting within urban systems and spaces. The leading edge of applications of these technologies in China is creating uniquely contemporary urban phenomena and conditions.