Lauren Sorkin*, Acting Executive Director, Gloal Resilient Cities Network Gerald Singham, Chairman, National Crime Prevention Council, Singapore Tolullah Oni, Urban Health Physician and Epidemiologist, University of Cambridge This aspect is mostly concerned with data protection, and here national governments need to implement the right regulations to ensure that cities have permission to use the data they gather and that the data remains secure at all times.Kimihiro Hino, Associate Professor, Department of Urban Engineering, The University of TokyoĮsteban Léon, Head, City Resilience Global Programme, UN-Habitat It is also evident that the legal framework is a key to the success of a Smart City strategy.

For the most part, the reasons for this lie not in the strategies themselves but in the fact that responsibilities are unclear and there is no single entity in charge of coordinating all of the different groupings involved.Ĭonversely, cities that do have a central decision-making body, like Vienna with its Smart City Agency or London with its Chief Digital Officer, perform well on implementation and lead the rankings as a result. While the number of urban centers with a Smart City strategy has almost doubled since the first Smart City Index in 2017, rising from 87 back then to 153 this year, the cities still have a lot of work to do on implementation. The analysis highlights the importance of central coordination. More cities have an explicit Smart City strategy but implementation is problematic for many So an integrated strategy that is planned and managed centrally is crucial. An e-mobility strategy, for example, should always be integrated into intelligent traffic management systems and powered via smart electricity grids. But it's only when these solutions are interconnected and aligned in the form of a Smart City strategy that the individual measures can unfold their full potential. Growing populations and increasing challenges such as traffic congestion, air pollution and insufficient infrastructure have seen cities the world over turn to digital technologies to solve their problems. Successful Smart Cities implement their strategy with the help of a central decision-making entity and pilot projects. There is also a lot of work to do on implementation. Remarkably, 90 percent of the analyzed cities still do not have an integrated strategy.

On average, however, it's mainly Asian metropolises that demonstrate the most compelling Smart City strategies. Second in the ranking is another European city, London. The Austrian capital Vienna again tops the Smart City Index, Roland Berger's analysis of 153 cities around the world.

Global city index 2019