Smart-city rankings measure institutions, not technology

The same names appear at the top of every serious smart-city ranking, year after year — Zurich, Oslo, Canberra, Geneva, Singapore, Copenhagen, Helsinki. None of them runs the continent’s most ambitious smart-city procurement programme; none of them is the densest in connected devices. What they share is mature public institutions, predictable service delivery and administrative capacity that residents can rely on. Despite the label on the box, that is what these rankings are mostly measuring.

What the rankings actually count

The IMD Smart City Index, published annually by the IMD World Competitiveness Center in Lausanne since 2019, derives roughly half of its score from a structured resident survey — perceptions of health services, transport, housing affordability, corruption, public participation. The remaining half comes from technology-related indicators, but those too are filtered through whether residents experience services as working. A city can deploy every available digital tool and still slide in the index if the resident-perception side does not move.

The IESE Cities in Motion Index, run from the University of Navarra since 2014, makes the same point more openly. Technology is one of nine dimensions, alongside Human Capital, Social Cohesion, Economy, Environment, Governance, Urban Planning, International Outreach and Mobility. The cities at the top — typically London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Seoul — score well across most dimensions, with Governance and Human Capital weighing as much as Technology. The Easypark Smart Cities Index leans more technology-forward (electric-vehicle infrastructure, e-mobility, app coverage), and yet the leading positions are still dominated by Scandinavian and German-speaking cities, because the underlying preconditions — policy stability, public-sector capacity, predictable regulation — are themselves the binding constraint on the technology layer.

Why the top of the list does not move

Look at the cities that hold the top ranks across all four indices simultaneously and the pattern is straightforward. They are not the cities with the most experimental technology — they are the cities where the bus arrives on time, where the construction permit is decided in a documented procedure, where the water utility publishes its non-revenue water rate, where the public hospital is accountable to a regulator that actually regulates. Technology compounds those preconditions. It does not substitute for them.

McKinsey’s 2018 “Smart Cities: Digital Solutions for a More Livable Future” review is the most-cited continent-spanning evidence on this point and is explicit: the largest measurable quality-of-life gains from smart-city interventions occur when the technology is layered onto institutions capable of operating, monitoring and revising it. The OECD’s 2020 “Smart Cities and Inclusive Growth” framework reaches the same conclusion from a policy direction — governance frameworks, fiscal capacity and inter-jurisdictional coordination are treated as the upstream variables, with the technology stack downstream. UN-Habitat’s 2022 World Cities Report makes institutional capacity the cross-cutting differentiator between cities whose digital initiatives stick and cities where they decay.

What this means for African cities

Most African cities sit far down in the IMD and IESE rankings. The reason is rarely the absence of digital initiatives — many of the continent’s larger cities have active smart-city programmes, often multiple in parallel — but the resident-perception and Governance/Human-Capital scores that drag the composite down. Casablanca, for example, was included in earlier editions of the IMD Smart City Index and has since slipped because resident perceptions of service delivery did not move at the rate that smart-city investment volumes would have predicted. The pattern is consistent: technology added to weak institutions does not climb the ranking; institutional strengthening is what moves the score, and the technology that survives is the technology embedded in that strengthening.

The implication for African urban strategy is not to abandon technology — it is to stop treating technology as the lead indicator. A smart-city plan whose first deliverable is a procurement of a platform or a sensor network is a plan whose ceiling is fixed by the institution underneath it. A plan whose first deliverable is the strengthening of the procurement regime, the auditing function, the inter-jurisdictional coordination or the public-service operating model creates the ceiling that technology can later raise.

The practice consequence

The rankings are an external mirror of an internal truth: the smart city is the institution. That is the reason this practice puts data-driven planning, urban governance and people-centred service delivery upstream of every solution it works on, and treats the technology layer as a vendor-neutral toolset organised around them. The full operating frame sits on the Approach page; the governance-and-data layer specifically is on Data-Driven Planning & Urban Governance.

Cities that invest in institutions first will rise in any ranking that measures the lived experience of residents. Cities that invest only in technology will plateau — not because the technology is wrong, but because the surface underneath cannot carry it. The rankings have been saying so, quietly, for a decade.

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Sources: IMD Smart City Index methodology (IMD World Competitiveness Center, Lausanne); IESE Cities in Motion Index methodology (IESE Business School, University of Navarra); Easypark Smart Cities Index; McKinsey Global Institute, “Smart Cities: Digital Solutions for a More Livable Future” (2018); OECD, “Smart Cities and Inclusive Growth” (2020); UN-Habitat, “World Cities Report 2022”.