Whatever happened to the concept of ‘smart cities’? We used to write about them all the time, but the whole discipline seems to have splintered in recent years into a myriad of public and private urban smart-infrastructure sub-sectors, mostly covering the creeping modernisation of the built environment, transportation systems, and the distribution of sundry utility services. Most centralised municipal interest is about digital engagement and data governance, and work with the private sector to support the rest – plus some IoT for smart parking and smart bins.
But Swedish real-estate tech company ProptechOS, which sells a management platform for smart-building applications, has run the rule over the biggest cities in the US and Europe, and ranked them against a set of criteria proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for judging civic ‘smartness’. In all, it analysed 16 equally-weighted metrics (on a 0-100 scale) across three categories: connectivity and infrastructure, environmental sustainability, and the local tech job market.
The analysis – of the 48 largest cities by population in the US, and 23 European capitals with comparable data – was conducted last month (April 2024). And the results are now in, with cities ranked by their total score across the 16 measures, and flagged also for their performance in each of the three OECD categories. And the scores are in. They suggest that, in the US, the smartest city of them all is Seattle, in Washington State, which beats Miami in Florida (in second) and Austin in Texas (third). Austin won the bout last time out, said ProptechOS.
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