Smart City Index 2025

Background & Aim

• The ISUI Smart City Index is jointly developed by ISUI and Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Smart Cities Research Institute (SCRI), endorsed and published by the International Society for Urban Informatics.
• Echoing the new trend in smart-city development, we aim to develop a universally applicable, objective, comprehensive, and human-centric Smart City Index fully based on publicly available datasets.
• We hope this index will help cities review their development status and explore ways to become smarter cities for everyone.
  

Features of This Index

• Human-centric: concentrated on the impact and changes that smart cities bring to the lives of citizens.

• Theoretical continuity and conceptual expansion: rooted in the foundational understanding of what constitutes a functioning city.
• Universality: balanced consideration in stages of development and cultures of the cities.
• Objectiveness and repeatability: fully based on publicly available data.
  

Updates in ISUI Smart City Index 2025

• Expanded conceptual foundation: Integrates core urban factors to bridge historical functions with modern smart city frameworks.
• Wider coverage: Increased from 50 to 73 cities for better global representation and regional comparison.
• New evaluation indicators: New evaluation methods for social exclusion and green open public spaces across diverse urban contexts.
• Improved weighting: Reduced sensitivity to heavy-tailed data distributions in geographic metrics.
• Bias-adjusted scaling: Refined per capita indicators with nonlinear population adjustments to mitigate large-city undervaluation.