The phrase "smart cities" has only emerged in the past few years, yet conferences, companies, citizens, and cities around the globe have become enamored with the concept. After all, who wants to live in a dumb city?
Still, the field has yet to reach consensus on a definition for "smart cities," let alone on how to compare one city to another in the same country, or around the globe.
As a researcher and consultant, I have been working on two primary initiatives to resolve these issues. The first, as reported here in December, was the development of the Smart Cities Wheel, a holistic tool for developing and implementing smart cities strategies:
The other initiative I have been working on is a benchmarking project. The first of these was published in January 2012, before the Smart Cities Wheel was developed, using data gathered across a range of categories. The result was the first global ranking of its kind.
After developing the Smart Cities Wheel, I expanded the sources of data I used to benchmark cities. This resulted in a need to regionalize the ranking because many data sources did not allow for easy comparison across different regions.
What follows here is my first-ever regional ranking of Asia/Pacific cities, published exclusively with UBM's Future Cities. Below is a table ranking the Top 10 in order, which will be discussed in greater detail in the subsequent pages.
Table 1: The 10 Smartest Cities in Asia/Pacific
Final Rank
City
Smart Economy
Smart Enviro
Smart Governance
Smart Living
Smart Mobility
Smart People
1
Hong Kong
2
2
2
6
1
1
2
Singapore
3
4
5
3
4
3
3
Seoul
5
1
1
7
5
10
4
Tokyo
8
5
7
4
5
7
5
Auckland
9
6
4
1
10
2
6
Sydney
6
10
6
2
9
4
7
Kuala Lumpur
1
6
8
8
7
6
8
Taipei
7
3
9
9
3
5
9
Shanghai
4
6
3
10
8
8
10
Osaka
10
6
10
5
2
9
One final note: The Asia/Pacific region presents many difficulties for researchers trying to compare cities, due to language differences, differing levels of transparency, and the infrequent existence of inter-regional databases. Despite the challenges, this report is arguably the first data-driven ranking of smart cities in Asia/Pacific. I look forward to your comments and feedback.
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: 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?
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.
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).
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?"
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: 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
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?
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