Why Smart City Rankings Are A “Logistical” Nightmare

Smart city rankings are a logistical nightmare. That's the topic of this week's analyst perspective with Charles Reed Anderson. Charles is the founder of the IoT and smart city advisory firm CRA & Associates. He routinely analyzes data from leading research firms to learn which city is smarter than the rest. But what he ultimately finds are more questions than answers. Here's Charles with more. So one of the questions that I'm asked most frequently is which smart city is the smartest? And I'll be honest with you, I have to do my best to control my cynicism when I'm asked that. And it's not because I don't look forward to the day when cities transform the way we work, live, and play. It's because I realize how incredibly difficult it would be to do an accurate survey and ranking. Now just think about this. One city is going to have between 25 to 30 different government agencies. You'd have to look. at the processes and operations and services provided of each of those for each city and it becomes a logistical nightmare but a lot of people still do smart city rankings so that's what we're going to take a look at today and what i've decided to do is look at four large smart city rankings from 2019 and the first one comes from imd the swiss business school in partnership with singapore university of technology and design the second one comes from esa the spanish school, the third one from Easy Park Group, and the fourth one from the consulting firm AT Kearney. Now each of them looked at over 100 cities but they have different methodologies. IMD for instance was qualitative based. They surveyed 120 citizens in each city to find out their perception of how smart their city is. And I'll be honest that raised a bit of a red flag for me because it doesn't sound like the most analytical way to go about it. But the other three, ESA, Easy Park, and AT Kearney. are a quantitative base, and they look at variables across economic indicators, human capital, social cohesion, governance, etc. So I was hoping that when we compared the different rankings, we'd find some consistencies. Unfortunately, that's not the case. But first, the good news. Singapore ranked number one in IMD, and it also ranks in the top 10 in the other three rankings as well. The bad news is, it's the only city in the world that ranks in the top 10 in all four surveys. and you start going down and you just find a bunch of anomalies that don't make a lot of sense. London's ranked number one in the world by ESA, number two by AT County, yet number 50 by EZ Park. New York's ranked number one by AT County and two by ESA, but number 38 by IMD. When you dig deeper, you get more questions. For instance, where are the Chinese cities at on these surveys and rankings? They're all farther down the list, yet they're the ones who are leading in smart city initiative deployments, spending, they're leading on AI. digital currencies, drone deliveries, yet they're hardly ranked anywhere near the top. So I'm pleased to announce the Charles Reed Anderson Perfect Smart City Ranking, or the CRAP Smart City Ranking for short. And here's my CRAP methodology. I found out that only 44 cities were reviewed in all four of the indices that we looked at earlier. So I totaled up their scores in each of those four surveys and divided by four. It may sound simple, but it's important not to overcomplicate. a crap methodology. And what I found was that Singapore by far leads the way, followed by Amsterdam, Zurich, Vienna, and Copenhagen. In total, nine of the top 20 were from Europe, eight were from North America, and three were from Asia Pacific. So basically, why did I want to create this crap ranking? Because I wanted to point out that smart city rankings, like this video, should be taken with a pinch of salt. Smart city rankings are fun to read and can be a useful marketing tool. but they're not an accurate reflection of how smart a city is. So I don't want cities and people to get too focused on the height and on the rankings. What I want cities to do is focus on delivering tangible value. Value back to the city and its operations, to the businesses that operate in those cities, and most importantly, to the citizens. If you have questions for Charles, be sure to hit the button below, and stay tuned for his next episode on Current Insights, this one digging in to smart city market forecasts.