Juniper Research and Intel released a recent study Global Smart City Performance Index 2017 where they ranked top 20 global smart cities according to their performance across different metrics – mobility, health, safety, and productivity. The study focuses not just on smart city technologies but more importantly on people with emphasis on how these technologies ‘give back’ time to its citizens and improved their overall quality of living.
Singapore emerged as the top city in all metrics ahead of San Francisco, Seoul, New York, and London.
Some of the notable findings in the research are the following :
In the area of mobility Singapore along with San Francisco and London are among the top cities addressing the challenges in urban transportation. Singapore’s policies on car ownership along with connected traffic solutions helped curbed congestion and emission from vehicles.
Singapore also topped the rankings in health along with Seoul and London. In the last decade, the number of elderly surpassed the number of younger people in Singapore. This demographic change entails special needs when it comes to healthcare which Singapore is already addressing by means of ‘a range of technologies, including digital service platforms as well as remote monitoring devices’.
Singapore is known to be one of the safest cities in the world and the report highlighted its ‘trials using smart video surveillance to detect criminal activity’.
The report notes that Singapore’s unique status of being a ‘city-state’ is a major contributing factor in ‘its ability to execute its smart city vision’. The transformation of Singapore in just over 50 years from a third-world to a first-world country and one of the leading in Asia provides many invaluable lessons for other cities to learn.
