Without a team of researchers, nor the budget of a multinational, I have relied on the Innovation Cities Index to narrow down the pool to a manageable list of cities to rank.
Innovation Cities collects more than 160 indicators on innovation in global cities and then provides a ranking. I believe that a smart city must be an innovative city. So in order to be considered in the Asia/Pacific smart cities rankings, the city must have achieved a Top 100 global ranking in the Innovation Cities Index. This narrowed down the potential candidates to 17.
Once I had the 17 cities for consideration, I leveraged the Smart Cities Wheel to search for databases with comparative data on essential components. Below is a table that summarizes the secondary data sources used to benchmark and rank Asia/Pacific smart cities.
Table 2: Data Sources
Component
Publisher
Description
Notes
Links (where applicable)
Smart Economy
Brookings
Brookings Institute researches economic growth rates in 300 of the largest cities across the globe.
Using Siemens data and data from other sources, to obtain CO2 per capita for each city.
Smart Governance
Rutgers
Gathered data on 100 major cities to assess security, usability, and content of municipal websites; the type of online services currently being offered; and citizen response and participation through websites established by municipal governments.
While the researchers have not yet published their latest ranking, they were kind enough to provide me an advanced copy for use in this report.
N/A
Carbon Disclosure Project
The CDP recently launched a standard for cities to transparently report their carbon footprints.
Note, the use of CDP for cities reporting was a binary measure in this study (yes/no) as a proxy for levels of transparency in cities.
Green Cities Index contains analysis of 3 aspects of municipal transit.
Cities are grouped into 4 different categories depending on their performance on those 3 aspects of municipal transit.
Siemens Green City Index
Other
I used multiple sources to obtain information on public transit ridership per capita.
It is surprisingly difficulty to obtain comparable data on transit ridership across cities in the region. Ideally, would like to add non-motorized transit but data not widely available.
N/A
Applying the Smart Cities Wheel
Whenever possible, I identify robust sources of data that have in themselves utilized multiple indicators to assess one component of the smart cities wheel.
Smart Living is measured very well by Mercer's annual Quality of Living rankings. Mercer uses 39 criteria across health, crime, education, climate, and other categories to rank the quality of life in more than 200 cities each year.
The same goes for Citigroup's Hotspots report and its application to the Smart People component. The Hotspots report "compares 200 of the world’s major urban agglomerations across eight distinct categories of competitiveness and 31 individual indicators." I used Citigroup's Human Capital dimension as the lone metric for Smart People.
I sought to use the same data source to compare all cities in the study. Unfortunately, that was not always possible, so I had to use multiple sources. This opens up the risk that some of the data is not perfectly comparable. This occurred, for example, in the analysis of Smart Mobility. While Mobility is one of the categories of the Siemens Green City Index -- a great resource for comparing cities on sustainability -- this study did not include cities from Australia and New Zealand in its ranking. Therefore, I found additional information about mobility in these cities. (I sought, but was unable to obtain, comparable data on non-motorized transit use in the Asia/Pacific region. I believe high rates of non-motorized transit [e.g., walking and cycling] demonstrate smart urban planning.)
While the data used here is secondary, this methodology leads to quality results and opens up the discussion of what makes a city smart, allowing us to begin benchmarking and sharing information across cities around the world.
Re: Smart list Ohh so relative This is a good exercise as a RELATIVE exercise in "smartness", but having lived the past year in Singapore I would hardly concur with your view that there are "smart" locations in Asia. Please, set your benchmarks, baselines, level of credibility, higher than business-as-usual, which is where these 10 "top" locations stand. None are really, truly "smart". They are, at best, "sensible", not in the "common sense" definition, but in the "alive and resPonding to stimuli" definition.
If you REALLY want Smart, then define the idea to which we should be aspiring: zero net emissions, zero net energy, zero net water, zero net waste, zero net externalities, and near zero virtual energy, water, resource imports.
Then we will have a better sense of how far we are from where we need to be, and how important it is for us to tap into transformational changes, not just incremental improvements that will fail miserably if that is all we do
Re: Smart list Ohh so relative No doubt we have a long way to go to achieve the ideal. But that shouldn't stop us from praising those cities that are headed in the right direction.
The risk of getting discouraged too soon is that it can hinder incremental progress toward the bigger goals. Some citizens might think, "I can't get there, so why try?"
Re: Smart list Thanks Mary, per my above comment to another reader, I have actually applied the same approach to ranking EU and North American Cities. Those rankings can be found on Fastco Exist.
Great criteria I love seeing all of these criteria in one place to define a smart city. It helps to get a bigger picture, so we can see where we need to improve! Have you applied these criteria to any north or south American cities?
Re: Great criteria Thank you for your feedback on the rankings. In fact I have completed rankings of EU and North American cities using the same smart cities wheel framework. They were published in Fast Company's online site which focuses on impact (fastcoexist).
Smart Cities Good comparison. I would be intersted in seeing a complete list of the North American cities, in particular, where my home Las Vegas falls in the analysis. Might create incentive to get off our collective back sides and smarten up.
Re: Consider Wuxi It does seem that Wuxi has a lot of initiative and much growth. Are you a resident there? Can you tell us a bit about what's happening?
No, I'm not living there but was on a visit to Wuxi Institute last summer as our company has a joint research and development project with the Institute. I could, due to time reasons, only see a part of Wuxi that has been re- or newly built. Big roads, 3 lanes in each directions and and very little traffic. It looked similar to the US west coast with the exception of the apartment buildings, usually a bunch of about 15 with 20 or so storeys. The only real "green" thing I was presented to was the extremely sophisticated system for waste handling.
I had to Google to find some information in order to answer your questions and found a very interesting article in Washington Post from 2007 about the efforts done by the city. Please see link below.
Re: Wuxi Green City Hmmm.... Kudos to Wuxi for handling the pollution. But it did so only after some unjustified persecution of whistle blowers. And apparently the tactics didn't cut into pollution denial elsewhere in the country. I quote from the link you provided:
Instead of shunning the polluting companies in Wuxi, delegations from other parts of China have been coming to Wuxi to invite them to come to their cities.
Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? Even though Shanghai is forging ahead in its smart-city status, shouldn't its high level of air pollution knock it out of the top 10? I know in recent years the government has been moving the largest polluters on the outskirts of the city to other locales where their toxic exhaust won't effect Shanghai's air quality. But that doesn't solve the problem, it just shifts it somewhere else. Not too smart, no?
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? This is a thought, Susan. We laud China's growth but in many of its cities, the environment is being trampled in the process.
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? I haven't been to Shanghai, but a friend spent a year abroad there recently and called home several times in the first month to say he was having a hard time breathing because the pollution was so bad. That seems pretty fundamental to quality of life.
Shanghai may have made great strides on the technology front and in other smart-city ways -- and that's all to be praised. But rather than address pollution at its core, the city seems to have simply pushed it onto other smaller cities and, according to this report in the International Business Times, the consequences for those regions have been severe.
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? Mary, this reminds me of something that a few Chinese business partners said when we met recently. We happened to be driving from a site and passed by a beach resort. Eagerly, they asked if we could stop because they wanted to check out the view and maybe take a dip. They explained that they could no longer do the same in Shanghai because the waters were "black" already--that was what they said. It's pretty sad that moving forward in terms of economy and development, in a way, led to the degradation of their resources.
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? Thank you for the feedback on the rankings. I agree that pollution is a major issue in Shanghai and in many cities around the globe. Note that in the discussion of Shanghai's ranking I concluded:
"Of course, like many Asian cities, Shanghai faces challenges including growing emission levels (nearly 10 tons of GHG/capita) and air pollution."
What minimum criteria should a city be required to meet in order to be ranked is a challenging question of course. If we made pollution one of the minimum criteria we'd also have to establish a baseline. It is certainly possible but that too would be controversial.
However, I would agree that all cities aspiring to become a smart city/future city must address key things like clean energy, public transit, cycling, open data, better use of ICT, etc. This is of course why I use the Smart Cities Wheel to take a holistic approach to measuring smart cities.
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? I totally understand your holistic approach to the rankings, Boyd. It makes sense to consider a whole bunch of factors -- smart qualities -- to determine a city's rating. I just wonder if "air quality" shouldn't have a greater weighting than the others because it's so fundamental to quality of life. The thing is, we don't have a choice about breathing. It effects absolutely every facet of existence.
But you rightly raise the question of where to draw the line. Aren't there accepted international air quality standards that could be a good guide?
Also, it would be interesting to see how Asia's top 10 smart cities compare to Europe's top 10. Are they comparable in levels of "smartness" or are there degrees of differences?
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? Yes Susan, the point you are trying to make is absolutely thoughtful. But, I think Dr. Boyd Cohen, would have come to conclusion on such a list of cities based on years of research and he would have weighed the 'Pollution' factor appropriately.
Also, all the major bigger (now called 'Smarter' Cities) have this problem of Pollution. If you want to grow and be smart then you may have shell out atleast some part of the beauty you have. These are the cons of Urbanisation and I am afraid you may have to live with it.
Re: Shouldn't high pollution disqualify you? Eventually, I think a city's level of smartness will have to be a function of its real intelligence. For now, though, the holistic approach makes sense.
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