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Are you interested in indicators for smart sustainable cities?

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Summary ofh the article titled Comparative analysis of standardized indicators for Smart sustainable cities: What indicators and standards to use and when? from 2019 by Aapo Huovila, Peter Bosch and Miimu Airaksinen published in the Cities journal.

This is a great preparation for our next interviewee, Dr Aapo Huovila in ⁠episode 174⁠ talking about sustainable and smart cities.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what indicators can help, really help cities in their smart and sustainable journey. This article offers guidance for city managers and policy makers to select the indicators and standards that best correspond to their assessment needs and goals.

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

1. Smart sustainable cities aim to leverage technological solutions while ensuring they address the genuine multifaceted needs of urban environments, and encompassing economic, social, environmental and cultural dimensions.
2. Urban managers face the intricate challenge of selecting from a vast array of ‘indicators’ to monitor and track city progress.
3. Balancing the dual aspects of ‘smartness’ and ‘sustainability’ is pivotal for cities, requiring a holistic approach that aligns with the city’s unique context, and while standardized indicators offer a foundation, customization is essential to resonate with individual city characteristics and objectives.

Find the article through ⁠this link⁠.

Abstract: City managers need indicators for target setting, performance assessment, monitoring, management and decision-making purposes. The choice of the most suitable indicator framework is crucial, but difficult, as it requires expert knowledge. To help cities in their choice, this paper compares seven recently published indicator standards for Smart sustainable cities. A taxonomy was developed to evaluate each of their 413 indicators against five conceptual urban focuses (types of urban sustainability and smartness), ten sectoral application domains (energy, transport, ICT, economy, etc.) and five indicator types (input, process, output, outcome, impact). The results clearly discriminate between indicator standards suited for evaluating the implementation of predominantly smart city approaches versus standards more focused on sustainability assessment. A further distinction is possible in standards almost fully oriented towards impacts reached, and standards that allow for progress evaluation according to steps in the implementation process. Some standards provide a narrow focus on output indicators evaluating the progress in implementing smart urban ICT solutions (e.g. number of smart meters installed). Cities are encouraged to complement such evaluations with impact indicators that demonstrate the effects of those solutions. This paper provides guidance for city managers and policy makers to select the indicators and standard that best correspond to their assessment need and goals, and align with their stage in Smart sustainable city implementation.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• ⁠No.008R – What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities?⁠;
• ⁠No.071R – Towards intelligently sustainable cities?⁠;

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