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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled A multiple-attribute decision making-based approach for smart city rankings design from 2018 by Soledad Escolar, Félix Villanueva, Maria Santofimia, David Villa, Xavier del Toro, and Juan Carlos López published in the Technological Forecasting & Social Change journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see city-comparisons regarding smart cities. This article investigates and compares smart city rankings and suggests new approaches, using the example of New York, Seoul and Santander, to establish the proper evaluation of urban smartness.

Although there is no agreement on the definition of the smart city, it is commonly accepted that it suggests taking advantages of technology, and specially Information and Communication Technologies, ICTs to provide sustainable economical growth to increase the quality of life of citizens. Smart city refers for the authors to a city that monitors and integrates conditions of its critical infrastructures, such as roads and bridges, to better optimise its resources, plan its maintenance activities and monitor security aspects while the services to its citizens are maximised. The internet of Things, IoT is defined as the capability to empower computers with their own means of gathering information so they can see, hear and smell the world for themselves, and it is increasingly accepted as part of the smart city concept.

The city has been traditionally considered as a system in equilibrium, and it to become smart, has to arrange the adequate resources along one or several key dimensions, such as smart parking, structural health, smart lighting, waste management, and so on, to enable added-value services for the citizens. IoT can help such transformation with its hearing, seeing and smelling while implicitly working for us. However, to become smart, the level and quality of ICT deployment and implementation are not clear. Additionally, the meaning of smartness is still not specific, which creates the notion that just the usage of ICT makes a city smart.

Rankings provide effective instruments to assess the degree of urban smartness based on a set of urban indicators. By comparing the strengths and weaknesses of cities, a clear learning effect that promotes competition and innovation is generated. These rankings also should include technological criteria in addition to urban criteria since smart cities rely on ICT for their realisation, which seems to be missing. Therefore, this article describes a methodological approach for developing smart city rankings based on technological and smartness criteria.

City rankings are based on the election of a set of indicators through which the elected set of cities are evaluated. The indicator is a statistic of parameter that provides information on trends in the conditions of some phenomenon relevant to the city and it is represented as a number. The numbers then can be compared and standardised over time and across cities. Thus, by ordering the overall scoring of each city, ranking of cities can be obtained. The authors analysed four smart city rankings: Cities in Motion Index, European Smart Cities Ranking, Green City Index, and IDC Smart Cities Index, and also investigated other frameworks to measure urban smartness.

The analysed rankings introduced the dimension concept in addition to the indicators and various cities. A dimension refers to a field of realisation of a smart city, and each dimension is characterised by a set of attributes or indicators. On the other hand, rankings also have shortcomings. The data for the indicators comes often from secondary and statistical sources instead of the original source, and the indicators’ selection process is often a neglected part for the rankings. The authors especially highlighted the low level of technological and ICT significance in the rankings.

According to the authors, since it is commonly accepted that technology constitutes the cornerstone for the smart city materialisation, a ranking for smart cities should necessarily include criteria related to ICT and smart cities evaluation to help in quantifying the effort done by the cities to achieve smartness along the dimensions involved. Without ICT evaluation, a city ranking is not necessarily adequate for a smart city. While a city ranking is a metric of the urban development, a smart city ranking evaluates the materialisation degree of smart city concept. Therefore, a smart city ranking should incorporate specific indicators to measure not only the quantity of technological infrastructure, but also the quality and the smartness degree of the provided services.

Their proposed methodology is based on the multi-attribute decision making process, which aims at scoring and ranking multiple alternatives, like cities, that are characterised by multiple, usually conflicting attributes, like indicators. The proposed ranking explicitly introduces the concept of ICT dimension to represent a set of ICT-based attributes for evaluating the other vertical dimensions, thus providing a transversal ICT dimension. The aim of the ICT dimension is to incorporate smartness and technological information as a part of the quantification method in order to calculate the materialisation level of the smart city concept carried out by the city.

The smartness dimension considers ICT indicators related to the main enabling technologies for smart cities’ realisation: sensors and actuators, networking, platforms and services deployed, applications, standardisation level, and metrics to determine their impact on the city. Based on these enabling technologies, the authors selected 38 ICT indicators, like average percentage of use of smart city applications or number of smart dimensions of interest for the city, with smart or ICT type, while creating two more categories for them: standardisation level and evaluation metrics. These are intended to show the quantity of resources employed and if a certain feature of smart city is being used or not. The two specifically considered aspects of technologies were their scientific and technical relevance representing the interest of the research community on the topic, and the practical relevance showing its usage in pilots and demonstrators. Each indicator is provided a single value which is then normalised and weighted.

The authors investigated three cities to be ranked by this new ICT dimension: Santander, Seoul and New York. They were selected because they present a high availability of values within the proposed dimension. The authors collected and cleared the data from each city, then created the normalised and weighted valued. Santander has been the largest urban pilot project to establish a smart city, with five main domains: traffic, lighting and the environment, parks, mobile environment monitoring, and buildings and energy. Seoul is known as one of the most tech-savvy cities in the world which progressively evolved from a model based on advanced technological infrastructure towards a model that provides citizen-centric services while sustainability and competitiveness of the city are also boosted. Seoul has four domains: metering, governance and open data, safety, and waste management. New York city focuses on seven domains: smart infrastructure, smart transport and mobility, smart energy, smart environment, smart public health, smart safety, smart government and community.

Based on the data collected from the cities, and the produced indicators, New York has the highest aggregated value of the ICT indicators, while Santander is the second, and Seoul is the third. However, it is important to note that these results should be understood in the context of the demonstration of the proposed methodology and not as final results of its application. More importantly, the outcomes are oriented to understand better the strengths and weaknesses of the smart cities of today by focusing our attention on technological aspects. Compared to New York and Seoul, Santander is an example of smart city at a smaller scale and with different initiatives, while Seoul reaffirms itself in the role of tech-savvy city with the highest ratio of Wi-Fi hotspots and social network users, among others. Regardless, having the largest technological infrastructure does not imply achieving the highest degree of smartness.

The authors continued with the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed ICT-based methodology. This dimension provides coherence with the most commonly accepted vision of IoT and smart cities, creating some clear and shared understanding within the smart city concept, although the technology in itself is not enough, it needs to be paired with strategic plans oriented to improve urban aspects. Therefore, it is more important what is done with the data and technology, what could be done, and which impact it would have on the city. The ICT and smartness indicators enable to focus on the smart city development instead of urban development, while the set of indicators can easily be extended following the methodological steps.

However, this attempt was the first to try to evaluate not just the quantity but the quality of the applied technologies and smartness. The selected indicators can be subjective without the support and provision of wider research. Additionally, the involved cities were limited due to either lack of transparency or unawareness of the information needed.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Smart cities are commonly understood as being based on technology, especially ICT and IoT, while the existing rankings have not been paying enough attention to this aspect.
2. There hasn’t been ranking that would evaluate technology, ICT or IoT regarding its quality, not just quantity.
3. Smartness however, cannot be simply achieved with the application of technology, it must be paired with proper strategic planning.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Why do we assume that smartness stems from technology? Can you be smart without technology?
2. Why do we assume that New York and Santander should or want to have the same smartness based on the same indicators? One is a city with more than eight million people, and the other has around 180 thousand inhabitants, and we haven’t even touched upon their other differences. Should the different cities be measured with the same ranking, and achieve the same smartness?
3. Why is it important to have a smart city ranking instead of urban development ranking? There is no smart city without urban development, or is there?
4. Why do we use rankings to create a competition instead of finding out the exemplary cities to learn from for our own cities?

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