What is a hyperconnected city? ESI ThoughtLab defines it as one that leverages new digital technologies to transform and interconnect key areas of an urban ecosystem in order to unlock the greatest potential economic and social benefits for its citizens. These benefits come in different forms—from quantifiable advantages such as faster public transportation, lower crime rates, and higher levels of business investment, to less tangible gains such as greater citizen satisfaction. They touch on key areas of the ecosystem, including environment, energy and water, IT infrastructure, governance, talent and education, among others.
Our 2019 survey and analytical study of 100 smart cities around the world, Building a Hyperconnected City, has examined these and other dimensions of hyperconnectivity. To rank cities according to their progress towards becoming hyperconnected, we developed a Hyperconnected City Index with four main pillars: Connected Citizen, Technology, Data and Analytics, and Cybersecurity.
While arguably the trickiest pillar to measure precisely, The Connected Citizen is, by far, one of the most important. It evaluates how well a city engages and interacts with its key stakeholders, what methods it uses to communicate with them, and even how familiar citizens are with their city’s overall smart city initiatives.
Some of the most popular mechanisms used to interact with citizens include government websites (97% of cities), email (96%), mobile apps (87%), citizen surveys (68%), social media (66%), community group websites (65%), and text message (65%). Less used are open data portals (58%), 24-hour call centers (55%), online chat rooms (35%), and city dashboards (34%).
Engaging citizens not only brings potential benefits, including greater citizen satisfaction, but it is also key to the success of a hyperconnected city. In our survey, gaining the support of citizens and other stakeholders was cited by 52% of respondents as the biggest challenge to developing a smart city program. The figure is even higher (75%) in lower income markets, where citizens often see smart initiatives as only beneficial for the rich. Furthermore, only 32% of average citizens in our 100 cities are very familiar or extremely familiar with their city’s smart city activities. For lower income cities, that figure is just 13%.
Moscow’s Best Practices
Overcoming citizen skepticism and lack of knowledge can only come through programs that engage citizens even more actively and concretely demonstrate the value of smart initiatives.
Moscow is a city that provides an instructive example of citizen engagement best practice. To ensure that all citizens—particularly older ones—benefit from its smart initiatives, it developed several programs, including one to train people on using digital technology, websites, and apps. It also built a platform that that facilitates two-way information flow. According to Eldar Tuzmukhametov, head of Smart City Moscow, “We deliver services to citizens, but we also want to hear what they think, what they do, and what they need.”
To optimize its services, Smart City Moscow collects data from its citizens, including their opinions on current services and ones they want the most. Its digital platform ensures that stakeholders have up-to date communication and are regularly involved in decision-making. The platform offers nearly 300 public services for citizens and businesses via a website and a mobile app. “We provide nearly one billion services per year,” says Tuzmukhametov. But it also asks them for suggestions, and acts on them.
- Our City, a website and app, allows citizens to file complaints. More than one million citizens have used the app, and more than two million complaints have been addressed.
- Active Citizen allows citizens to vote on city issues. It has two million users, and over 2,600 polls have been conducted, leading to 1,500 decisions being made.
- Crowd is a discussion board for proposing ideas for improving community projects. It has 130,000 active users, who have proposed 84,000 ideas.
- Moscow Online School connects schools with an online learning platform. It includes Wi-Fi, interactive screens, electronic diaries, and tablets. Helped by a $300 million investment, the tool is now used in over 700 schools. Some 65,000 teachers and 980,000 students have been reached.
It is important for cities that seek to advance on their journey to heed the lessons from Moscow, which has made connecting with its citizens a prime focus of its activities. Other key findings from our survey underscore how citizen engagement correlates with being a hyperconnected leader. Eighty percent of cities that are leaders in our rankings keep their citizens informed of smart city initiatives, versus 46% of other cities. Some 96% of leaders reach out to stakeholders regularly to demonstrate the value of smart city programs, versus 42% of others. And leading cities are more likely to have a chief citizen experience officer (28%) than others (12%).
As notes Tuzmukhametov of Smart City Moscow, becoming a hyperconnected city is not just about technology; it’s about people, processes, and policies.
Anna Szterenfeld is Director of Editorial Operations for ESI ThoughtLab. She is a multilingual writer and editor with 30 years of experience assessing and forecasting global political and economic risk, policy trends and business operating conditions, with a particular focus on the Americas. For many years she served as Regional Manager and Latin America Editor with The Economist Group, where she supervised analysts and editorial teams in Mexico, Brazil, London, and Gurgaon (India), as well as a contributor network in more than 20 countries.
Over the past 4 months, our team of economists and thought leaders have surveyed government officials spanning 50 countries to better understand their use of data and analytics across various dimensions such as energy and water, public health and safety, and mobility and transportation. Using the results from the survey, we have created The Hyperconnected Cities Index. The index is comprised of four main pillars–The Connected Citizen, Technology, Data and Analytics, and Cybersecurity.
Kaitlyn MacLennan was an intern at ESI for the summer of 2019. Ms. MacLennan graduated from Temple University in May 2019, with Bachelor Degrees in Economics and Spanish. We wish Kaitlyn the best of luck in her future endeavors and thank her for her contributions to ESI this summer!
Nancy MacDonald, Vice President, Interim Director, Stantec’s Urban Places: Many cities around the world have already implemented some form of smart technology, but none have really achieved the perfect harmony of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity. It’s going to require some big thinking, and while technology is an important piece of the puzzle, we need intelligent planning to make our ideas work together and find solutions to urban problems that improve outcomes for the people living in our cities.
Maduabuchi Gerald, Co-founder, Uchald Integrated Ltd: The knowledge gap among investors, regulators, government officials and entrepreneurs. Inefficient business development processes, failure to localize business concepts in line with the people’s culture and social behavior, and inadequate research or studies for workable business plans before business start-ups has resulted in the failure of most business in Africa.
Steve Hamilton, Senior Manager, GPS Risk and Financial Advisory, Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP: Taxpayers seldom embrace expensive projects whose value they may not recognize, and cities often face budget constraints. The benefits, economic and other, need to be communicated and demonstrated. In communicating the value of these projects, there is tremendous room to experiment with multiple innovative financing models like pay-for-performance, share value capture, social or green impact bonds, various types of public-private partnerships, and data and asset monetization through things like road user charging or smarter curb management. Procurement and innovation models are changing, and we are just beginning to understand both the financial and non-financial opportunities.
Suparno Banerjee, Global Public Sector Lead, Enterprise, Nokia: New challenges and new opportunities will keep emerging. In a digital world, innovation can keep pace with these changes. Unlike previous development models, where new systems were meant to last almost unchanged for a significant length of time, the connected smart city requires that we think of innovation on a continuous basis.
Joan Ricart, Co-academic Director, IESE: Becoming hyperconnected is a journey that starts with data integration and the development of an open data strategy, followed by the necessary technical infrastructure for connectivity. With this foundation, different steps of collaboration come into play, representing a total reorganization of City Hall.
Xiao Yang, Researcher, Urban Issues, ANBOUND: The construction of a smart city is not only a project, but also a process. Only by defining the design of the top layer, considering the overall situation and the long-term perspective, can we identify the advantages and disadvantages of a smart city, find a breakthrough point, break the inherent interests of various departments, and achieve optimal allocation of effective resources. Good top-level design will help clarify the staged goals of information digitalization, internet integration, and digital intelligence. In this way, the construction of smart cities can be clearly leveled and promoted in good order. Only then can we strengthen the integration with the surrounding cities, make good use of their experience of smart city construction, existing information, and platform resources, and reduce redundant construction.
Chungha Cha, Co-founder & Chair, Re-imagining Cities Foundation: We strongly believe that the first step is to understand “WHY”… so why does any city want to get “hyperconnected”? We strongly agree with ESI ThoughLab that, “by making cities smarter—not just in using technology but in all that they do—government leaders hope to drive competitiveness and growth, while making massive social, business and environmental improvements. But without a clear playbook for the future, cities run the risk of falling behind their peers.”
Bill Baver, Go to Market Leader, Smart World team, NTT Data:
Kathleen O’Dell, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP: Residents can be an important source of data generation, solution development, and testing for both governments and businesses. They increasingly play the role of “prosumers” in smart cities—producing and consuming the data for better decision-making. For instance, with the growing ubiquity of wearable and connected devices, citizens can co-create data itself like reporting of potholes and helping to identify homeless people. Citizens can take a proactive role as co-creators in shaping smart city policies and initiatives. They can also be conscious and vocal about the change that smart city transformation will entail.
Wayne Best, Chief Economist, Visa: The best thing that residents can do is to engage and participate. Gain a level of understanding of the benefits and balance them against any concerns (security, privacy or otherwise) so that they are contributing to the process.
Joseph Viscuso, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Growth, Pennoni: Cybersecurity may be one of the most important aspects when implementing hyperconnected systems. As cyber attacks have become common, the public expects security measures to be in place, and that will extend to technologies throughout hyperconnected systems.
Rana Sen, GPS Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP: How smart city initiatives deliver human outcomes and help solve social problems. The smartest cities can become more inclusive through service design, infrastructure planning, and mobility solutions, driving economic growth for everyone. It would be great to see how smart cities can enhance livability and drive more sustainable development for all.
Xiaoqi Fang, Researcher, Urban Issues, ANBOUND: We hope that through the construction of smart cities, we can leave a wealth of digital assets for the history of human development. Cultural and artistic information is also in the process of rapid digitization. These are valuable urban digital assets that are relevant to future generations. Promoting a city’s history and cultural digital assets will enrich the most critical content platform of smart cities. It will also maintain the vitality of cultural assets in the digital and information age. In the future, smart cities should focus more on the city’s digital assets as a key value point, making them shine in the fields of culture, tourism and urban value.
Raul Garcia Rodriguez, Regional Director of Operations, Bogaris: Governments should cover the financial gap for businesses to take on the SDGs until the moment they realize that sustainability is, in itself, increasing the ROI in the mid-long term, while the “traditional” model focuses more on the short-mid term ROI, which is no longer sustainable.
Lindsay Durkalec is a business development and marketing associate at ESI. In addition to assisting with proposals, Ms. Durkalec is responsible for enhancing ESI’s brand and work through traditional and social media, content development for the web, and managing the ESI blog, Present Value.