Smart City Indexes

I recently read a post on Linkedin about how to rank Smart Cities and a number of comments underneath pointed at various methodologies used to do this. Having looked at a number of these over the years I thought that I’d give my own take on this.

How to Rank Smart Cities

You don’t. This isn’t a competition and there is no requirement to see who’s ‘best’. 

The whole point of a smart city is to make the lives of its citizens better. How you define better will depend on the city and the unique issues that that city has. You can not therefore create a general index of cities across the world and try to rank them into some type of leaderboard based on a set of generic criteria. 

Each country is very unique and each city and town within those countries is also unique and they suffer from individual problems. Measuring a city’s smartness based on whether they have a car parking app is completely irrelevant (one example of a measure I’ve seen!). There are many cities where poverty is a huge problem and owning a car is a pipe dream to many let alone worrying about saving two minutes on a journey to park it! 

Even looking at poverty across the world, the differences are huge, compare some of the worst areas of the UK to those of Brazil or India, again huge disparity and each city will need it’s own unique smart solutions and the measure of success of these solutions may take years to fully understand the impact. 

What we do need instead of a meaningless ranking list is a list of cities, issues, solutions and results. Only then will we have a real idea about how technology and smart thinking is really helping to improve citizens lives. Solutions that work well in Brasil, may not work well in India or the UK. The cultural make up, politics, history and background of cities will be a huge factor in the success of programmes. 

Taking the smart parking app as a use case, as it’s a current pet hate of mine. These rankings are measuring if a city has one. What they’re not looking at is the number of users vs drivers not using, number of spaces available, number of spaces not available when you arrive at the destination, the average journey time saved of those using the app vs those not, drop in emissions due to this saving, effect on people's health due to the app. When we start seeing figures coming out around the technology and real long term air quality benefits that have real health improvements, then using this as a ranking tool is irrelevant. Of course there needs to be pilots of this technology but the results from multiple cities need measuring and publishing. And remember the answer to parking issues might be more car parks, removing on-road parking, park and rides, etc. But you won’t know this until the studies are complete. 

But if in your index or competition you score points for having the parking app then some cities will install this without really understanding the problem it solves or the outcomes of that or the differences it will make to peoples lives.

So for now, can we stop worrying about where cities are on a meaningless index and look at the actual problems that have been identified and the solutions that are being put in place and the outcomes of these. 

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