Smart city index

A smart city index is a published league table that ranks cities by how "smart" they are. Each picks indicators, scores every city on them, weights the scores and adds them up — and that weighting is an editorial choice made by whoever publishes the table. The IMD Smart City Index from Lausanne barely counts technology: it asks residents how their city feels to live in, about 400 of them in each of 148 cities (2026 edition). The UN's Local Online Services Index instead scores what a city website can actually do — Moscow led its 2018 pilot round with 55 of 60 indicators met on mos.ru.

So a rank can move without a single new sensor. Zurich's smart-city strategy sits behind the city that has topped the IMD index every year since 2020 — not because it deploys more technology than Seoul, but because its residents are unusually satisfied. Cities run the same mechanic internally: Beijing's Jiesu Jiban complaint system ranks sub-districts monthly on response, resolution and satisfaction rates, and a low place has consequences.

An index measures what is comparable, not what matters. Much of the input is supplied by the cities themselves, so a place can climb by documenting itself better, or by answering a survey more warmly. And the publisher is often not independent of the industry it ranks — Germany's Bitkom index is compiled by the digital-industry association whose members sell the technology a good score rewards. The long version is in our essay on how cities are ranked.