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Welcome to What is the future for cities podcast and its first Research episode, my name is Fanni, and today, I will introduce a research by summarizing it.

The first research episode is working with a 2007 research about smart cities, because this seems to be a grounding element of many smart city initiatives or business approaches, however, this specific research is rarely known by the wider community. The established 6 characteristics from this research appears in and out of academia, industry, and policy. Therefore, I thought it would be good to start with something which could help us to understand where part of the smart city concept started.

Our summary today works with the report titled as Smart Cities – Ranking of European medium-sized cities from 2007 by Rudolf Giffinger, Christian Fertner, Hans Kramar, Robert Kalasek, Nataša Pichler-Milanović, and Evert Meijers. The report is a summary of a research sponsored by Asset One Immobilienentwicklungs AG for a ranking of smart cities based on characteristics, factors and indicators. The characteristics, factors and indicators were established by the research group, as we will hear from the report.

In the 90’s and 2000’s, city rankings had become a central assessment instrument for urban areas. Due to the globalisation and its consequences, cities had been facing the challenge of competitiveness and sustainability at the same time. This had been highly likely to affect the urban quality in characteristics and factors, as the researchers said.

The researchers examined and compared different city-rankings and found that these had targeted different goals, had used different methods and had produced different results. Therefore, the researchers’ examination concentrated on these 3 main aspects: the objective, the methodology and the dissemination of the results in the city rankings. As they found, the objectives had been specified by the rankings through their aims, target audience, spatial scope and the included factors and indicators. Methodology had included the data collection, the limitations and the different weighting used by the rankings. Finally, data evaluation which had varied from one ranking to another, had been the crucial part of the city rankings.

On the other hand, the depth of each aspects varied widely. The researchers highlighted that the rankings which had presented the background, gave a deeper understanding and more applicability for the cities than the ones publishing only the final results.

One problem with the rankings was that the public had paid attention only to the final results without looking at the data behind the ranking. This had resulted in enforcing the existing status quo and neglecting the specifics, while the winners had praised and the losers had disregarded the results. Only serious consideration of the results and data revealed the actual strengths and weaknesses for the city, and that had created an empirical base for future activity.

Another problem was with generalisation. The stakeholders had asked for clear results to be communicated to the public, therefore there had been the ‘best’ and most attractive cities in general terms ignoring the fact that localities had differed and so had the requirements. The specialisation of the medium-sized cities, which had been their competitive advantage, had made it hard to compare them to global cities. That’s why these researchers highlighted that the rankings needed to be interpreted with caution to their results and methodology.

Therefore, the researchers’ project was clear on details: they targeted medium-sized cities and their potential developments. They highlighted medium-sized cities because the previous urban research had focused mainly on global cities though majority of the urban citizens had been living in medium-sized cities. These cities, to remain competitive, needed to identify their strengths and, according to the authors, city rankings were a tool to help them in doing so. However, as they highlighted, the previous rankings were not specifically for the medium-sized cities therefore the new established ranking system was specialized for them to compare and allow pinpointing the differences based on a comprehensive catalogue of indicators. Additionally, they applied a specific evaluation regarding the forward-looking development (such as awareness, flexibility, transformability, synergy, individuality) on the basic combination of local circumstances and activities carried out by politics, business and the inhabitants.

In 2007, the smart city term had not been used very widely, and the researchers identified various aspects for further elaboration. Concluding from the literature, they had arrived to the understanding that the smart city term had not been used in a holistic way, only for various aspects of the city, from an IT district to a smart education sector. They had collected six characteristics for the smart city from the literature: smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living. As a result, they defined smart city as “a city well performing in a forward-looking way in the six characteristics built on the smart combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent and aware citizens”. The 6 characteristics were supported by 31 factors which were based on 74 indicators, based on their research and data availability. For example, smart environment was described by attractive natural conditions including climate and green space, pollution, resource management and also by efforts towards environmental protection.

For the study, they also defined the medium-sized city: population between 100 and 500.000 people, and second cities in a European scale. Furthermore, they narrowed the scope to the cities where sufficient and accessible database had been for analysis. Thus, 70 cities were chosen with available data sources from 2001 to 2007 which helped to establish the 74 indicators. The chosen indicators achieved a final 87% coverage for the cities.

Additionally, they standardised the values transforming all with an average 0 and a standard deviation 1. They also aggregated the values on the indicator level by the coverage rate of each indicator, meaning that an indicator covering 40 cities weighed less than one covering all 70 cities. In this way they were able “to provide a good coverage over all cities to receive reasonable results”.

In their analysis, they provided a full ranking for the included cities, however, they also highlighted the opportunity to the municipalities to have their city profiles to understand the details of the broad final ranking. The details included the factorial and indicator level values giving the deep insight anyone who wishes to understand it.

Outside of the report, the most important results were published on the project’s homepage to get the insights for the included 70 cities. They also highlighted the opportunity for the city leaders to give further explanation and aid to act according to the results. The strategic advice based on the research could be useful for the cities in their pressured competition. They concluded that the truly smart cities use this city ranking as a tool to benchmark with other cities and draw lessons.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects: 1. the researchers emphasized the differences among the cities which makes it hard to compare them, 2. they established a definition for the smart city – as the literature shows, one of the many, 3. they introduced the six characteristics (smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living) which are still used widely in the industry and the policy side, and referenced in many different occasions in the literature.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions: 1. whether the comparison of cities will result in actionable steps or the rankings will remain just lists of winners and losers based on various sets of criteria, 2. how the practitioners can introduce the six characteristics into their design practice, as the researchers highlighted mainly the policy side.

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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