Prague has once again offended in the ranking of smart cities, it is in 78th place
For the second year in a row, Prague has fallen sharply worldwide ladder so-called smart cities, compiled by the Swiss IMD Institute and the University of Technology and Design in Singapore (SUTD) based on opinion polls among the inhabitants of 118 world capitals.
Prague is now in 78th place, while last year it was 44th and the year before it even occupied the 19th position. This year, the Czech capital was overtaken, for example, by Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing.
The ranking since its creation in 2019 is dominated by Singapore, which has always won first place and this year was the only one to receive the highest rating “AAA”. In second place is Geneva, followed by Oslo, which received the mark “AA”. Behind them are Taipei, Lausanne, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Geneva, the New Zealand capital Auckland and Bilbao. Vienna is ranked 11th, followed by New York, the best-rated city in the Americas.
In addition to technological and economic criteria, the so-called Smart City Index also assesses the quality of life, including health and safety, education, transport and leisure. “At the same time, Prague was offended by the relatively high rating in the first year of the ranking due to the fact that the authors began to take into account some new categories, such as awareness of traffic jams and housing availability,” said Kryštof Kruliš from the non-profit organization Consumer Forum. . with the Swiss IMD Institute.
In compiling the rankings, the researchers asked about 15,000 inhabitants of the world’s cities 39 questions about how satisfied they are with life in the city as its leadership. The questions concern various areas, of which the respondents were asked to identify five as the most important.
In Prague, people said that the highest priority for them was affordable housing, the traffic situation and corruption. In these areas, the Czech capital is doing the worst according to its inhabitants.
For example, she received a very below-average mark on the question of whether it is problem-free to find housing with a rent not exceeding 30 percent of monthly income in the city.
It also did poorly in terms of congestion or whether digitization had a positive effect on the quality of local authority services.
According to Kruliš, in the first years of the ranking, the inhabitants of Prague evaluated positively the very origin of various applications for smartphones, which were supposed to help, for example, with parking or in contact with the authorities. “It is no longer enough that the application exists,” he said of this year’s drop in the ranking, which he said can be observed in most of the monitored categories, which relate to digitization and the use of advanced technologies in city administration. “Thanks to the functionalities of a smart administrative city, (people) want to get where they need to go faster, manage their affairs more easily or really feel safe,” he added.
In addition to Prague, San Francisco also experienced a significant decline, where the locals are also most interested in affordable housing, while the opportunity to obtain cheap rental housing is even worse than the people of Prague. With Prague, for example, Bologna, for example, is one place ahead of the Czech capital this year, just like two years ago.