Smart Cities Index

PI: Prof Chan Heng Chee (LKYCIC, SUTD)
Team: Mr Sree Kumar, Dr Harvey Neo, Mr Poon King Wang, Dr Gayathri Haridas, Ms Rama Singhal, Mr Norakmal Hakim Bin Norhashim (LKYCIC, SUTD)

Smart cities are a fast-growing species, and a fascinating field for new experiments in a number of critical areas, ranging from urban planning, sustainable energy, and transport strategies to social integration and talent attraction, to name a few. As leaders and citizens around the world continue to assess, design, implement and improve on ways to create better cities, they often find themselves confronted with a multitude of decisions and a wide range of partial solutions to specific problems such as traffic congestion, waste management and crime. Unfortunately, they have precious few tools to enable them to define the strategies required and take advantage of the experience of other smart cities around the world. In such a context, metrics can play a significant and constructive role: by quantifying efforts and results, they increase the ability of decision-makers to identify where their priorities should lie as well as the relative merits of various approaches.

Undoubtedly, the universe of smart city indices is already a crowded one. Dozens of indices exist (many of them publicly available) that describe and measure the specific aspects of smart cities mentioned earlier. But in our view, few offer the multi-disciplinary basis that is required to encompass the strategic nature of “becoming a smart city.”

In 2017, IMD and SUTD decided to collaborate to address this gap and produce a smart city index offering a balanced focus on economic and technological aspects of smart cities on the one hand, and “humane dimensions” of smart cities (quality of life, environment, inclusiveness) on the other. To produce an internationally recognised global smart city index, this consists of two distinct phases and deliverables. First, a set of case studies at different stages of development, providing a diverse international basis of experience, with the purpose of enhancing the realism and pertinence of the model underpinning the index to be proposed. Second, a first iteration of the index methodology thus defined, leading to a first global ranking of smart cities along that index.