Prague has once again taken a turn for the worse in the ranking of smart cities, it is in 78th place
For the second year in a row, Prague has dropped significantly on a global scale ranking of so-called smart cities, compiled by the Swiss institute IMD and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) based on public opinion surveys among residents of 118 world capitals.
Prague is now in 78th place, last year it was 44th and the year before it even occupied 19th position. The Czech capital was overtaken this year by, for example, Warsaw, Moscow or Beijing.
Since its creation in 2019, the ranking has been dominated by Singapore, which has always taken the top spot and this year was the only one to receive the highest rating of “AAA”. In second place is Geneva, followed by Oslo, which received an “AA” grade. They are followed by Taipei, Lausanne, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Geneva, the New Zealand capital Auckland and Bilbao. Vienna is ranked 11th, followed by New York, making it the best ranked city in both Americas.
The so-called Smart City Index, in addition to technological and economic criteria, also evaluates the quality of life, including health and safety, education, transport and leisure. “At the same time, Prague worsened compared to 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 or the availability of housing,” said Kryštof Kruliš from the non-profit organization Consumer Forum, which collaborates on the ranking . with the Swiss Institute IMD.
To compile the ranking, researchers asked about 15,000 residents of the world’s cities 39 questions about how satisfied they are with life in the city and its management. The questions refer to various areas, of which respondents were asked to identify five as the most important.
In Prague, people said that for them, affordable housing, the traffic situation and corruption have the highest priority. At the same time, according to its residents, the Czech metropolis performs the worst in these areas.
For example, she received a very below average mark on the question whether it is easy to find housing in the city with a rent not exceeding 30 percent of the monthly income.
It also performed poorly in questions about traffic jams or whether digitization had a positive effect on the quality of local authorities’ services.
According to Kruliš, in the first years of the ranking, Prague residents positively evaluated the very creation of various applications for smart phones, which were supposed to help, for example, with parking or dealing with the authorities. “It’s no longer enough that the application exists,” he said of this year’s drop in the ranking, which he said can be seen in most of the monitored categories, which relate to digitization and the use of advanced technologies in city administration. “(People) want to get to where they need to go faster, handle their affairs more easily, or really feel safe thanks to the functionalities of a smart administrative city,” he added.
In addition to Prague, San Francisco also recorded a significant drop, where residents are also most interested in affordable housing, and they rate the possibility of finding cheap rental housing even worse than the people of Prague. Along with Prague, Bologna, for example, is also moving down the rankings, which this year surpassed the Czech capital by one place, just as it did two years ago.