ISO standards or global indices: Who decides if a city is smart?

Abstract

The Smart City status has become much sought after and desired as cities across the world continue to develop through smart initiatives. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) Smart City Indicators “..specifies and establishes definitions and methodologies for a set of indicators for smart cities”. As a highly recognised standards organisation with international impact the definitions and criteria used therein will inevitably influence wider understandings of smartness and smart cities. However, although the standards give extensive guidance on how to become smart, their benchmarks and assessment process arguably remain unclear. International Smart City Indices use various criteria to evaluate smartness and publish annual rankings. Yet the lack of consistency among them, as well as with the ISO Standards, suggests a disconnect between what regulators propose for the development of smart cities and what the Indices perceive and measure as smartness. This paper presents the current challenges of smart city standards adoption, particularly how these lead to vague and unmeasurable city changes, further contributing to an already chaotic state in defining smartness of cities. Through critical content and comparative analysis of the ISO standards and selected Smart City Indices, different conceptualisations of smart in both its evaluation and measurement are illuminated, revealing areas of complexity, ambiguity, dissonance and even conflict between them. This indicates a disparity between regulators and the wider smart city industry community, and thus potentially further problems in the progress of smart in reality.