What's the 'Smartest' City in America - Based on Tech Jobs, Connectivity, and Sustainability? (newsweek.com) 66
Seattle is the smartest city in America, with Miami and then Austin close behind. That's according to a promotional study from smart-building tools company ProptechOS. Newsweek reports:
The evaluation of tech infrastructure and connectivity was based on several factors, including the number of free Wi-Fi hot spots, the quantity and density of AI and IoT companies, average broadband download speeds, median 5G coverage per network provider, and the number of airports. Meanwhile, green infrastructure was assessed based on air quality, measured by exposure to PM2.5, tiny particles in the air that can harm health. Other factors include 10-year changes in tree coverage, both loss and gain; the number of electric vehicle charging points and their density per 100,000 people; and the number of LEED-certified green buildings. The tech job market was evaluated on the number of tech jobs advertised per 100,000 people.
Seattle came in first after assessing 16 key indicators across connectivity/infrastructure, sustainability, and tech jobs — "boasting 34 artificial intelligence companies and 13 Internet of Things companies per 100,000 residents." In terms of sustainability, Seattle has enhanced its tree coverage by 13,700 hectares from 2010 to 2020 and has established the equivalent of 10 electric vehicle charging points per 100,000 residents. Seattle has edged out last year's top city, Austin, to claim the title of the smartest city in the U.S., with an overall score of 75.7 out of 100. Miami wasn't far behind, achieving a score of 75.4. However, Austin still came out on top for smart city infrastructure, scoring 86.2 out of 100. This is attributed to its high broadband download speed of 275.60 Mbps — well above the U.S. average of 217.14 Mbps — and its concentration of 337 AI companies, or 35 per 100,000 people.
You can see the full listings here. The article notes that the same study also ranked Paris as the smartest city in Europe — slipping ahead of London — thanks to Paris's 99.5% 5G coverage, plus "the second-highest number of AI companies in Europe and the third-highest number of free Wi-Fi hot spots. Paris is also recognized for its traffic management systems, which monitor noise levels and air quality."
Newsweek also shares this statement from ProptechOS's founder/chief ecosystem officer. "Advancements in smart cities and future technologies such as next-generation wireless communication and AI are expected to reduce environmental impacts and enhance living standards."
In April CNBC reported on an alternate list of the smartest cities in the world, created from research by the World Competitiveness Center. It defined smart cities as "an urban setting that applies technology to enhance the benefits and diminish the shortcomings of urbanization for its citizens." And CNBC reported that based on the list, "Smart cities in Europe and Asia are gaining ground globally while North American cities have fallen down the ranks... Of the top 10 smart cities on the list, seven were in Europe." Here are the top 10 smart cities, according to the 2024 Smart City Index.
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Oslo, Norway
- Canberra, Australia
- Geneva, Switzerland
- Singapore
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Lausanne, Switzerland
- London, England
- Helsinki, Finland
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Notably, for the first time since the index's inception in 2019, there is an absence of North American cities in the top 20... The highest ranking U.S. city this year is New York City which ranked 34th, followed by Boston at 36th and Washington DC, coming in at 50th place.
Seattle came in first after assessing 16 key indicators across connectivity/infrastructure, sustainability, and tech jobs — "boasting 34 artificial intelligence companies and 13 Internet of Things companies per 100,000 residents." In terms of sustainability, Seattle has enhanced its tree coverage by 13,700 hectares from 2010 to 2020 and has established the equivalent of 10 electric vehicle charging points per 100,000 residents. Seattle has edged out last year's top city, Austin, to claim the title of the smartest city in the U.S., with an overall score of 75.7 out of 100. Miami wasn't far behind, achieving a score of 75.4. However, Austin still came out on top for smart city infrastructure, scoring 86.2 out of 100. This is attributed to its high broadband download speed of 275.60 Mbps — well above the U.S. average of 217.14 Mbps — and its concentration of 337 AI companies, or 35 per 100,000 people.
You can see the full listings here. The article notes that the same study also ranked Paris as the smartest city in Europe — slipping ahead of London — thanks to Paris's 99.5% 5G coverage, plus "the second-highest number of AI companies in Europe and the third-highest number of free Wi-Fi hot spots. Paris is also recognized for its traffic management systems, which monitor noise levels and air quality."
Newsweek also shares this statement from ProptechOS's founder/chief ecosystem officer. "Advancements in smart cities and future technologies such as next-generation wireless communication and AI are expected to reduce environmental impacts and enhance living standards."
In April CNBC reported on an alternate list of the smartest cities in the world, created from research by the World Competitiveness Center. It defined smart cities as "an urban setting that applies technology to enhance the benefits and diminish the shortcomings of urbanization for its citizens." And CNBC reported that based on the list, "Smart cities in Europe and Asia are gaining ground globally while North American cities have fallen down the ranks... Of the top 10 smart cities on the list, seven were in Europe." Here are the top 10 smart cities, according to the 2024 Smart City Index.
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Oslo, Norway
- Canberra, Australia
- Geneva, Switzerland
- Singapore
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Lausanne, Switzerland
- London, England
- Helsinki, Finland
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Notably, for the first time since the index's inception in 2019, there is an absence of North American cities in the top 20... The highest ranking U.S. city this year is New York City which ranked 34th, followed by Boston at 36th and Washington DC, coming in at 50th place.
Absolutely Correct (Score:3)
As a longtime Seattle resident, I can state with total objectivity that this is 100% Absolutely Correct.
Re: Absolutely Correct (Score:1)
I've only been to Seattle once, but all I remember from it aside from pikes place is you had to be careful to avoid stepping on people sleeping during the day. This was back in the aughts though, don't know if much has changed.
Re: Absolutely Correct (Score:5, Funny)
you had to be careful to avoid stepping on people sleeping during the day
Stop wandering around in the Boeing factory.
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Stop wandering around in the Boeing factory.
^^^THIS
If you ask someone out here "How many people work at Boeing?", the stock answer is, "About half of 'em."
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Is CHAZ/CHOP still a thing up there?
It may come as a surprise to people who get their "alternative facts" from FOX or OAN, but that whole thing lasted all of three weeks - and lost most of its steam after the first few days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It may come as a surprise to people who get their "alternative facts" from FOX or OAN,
These are the same people who believe Taylor Swift is a government psyop because *checks notes* she urged people to register to vote [yahoo.com].
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Yep. They bulldozed all of Seattle and it looks just like Beyond Thunderdome. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
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Yes indeed Mr Dumbfuck, the whole state of Washington is now a CHOP zone so please stay away and never, ever visit Washington.
In fact, the moment you cross the state line you're assigned a sex change doctor and you and your whole inbred family will undergo a forced gender-swap. The gubmint here also forces all of us to get a giant "WOKE" tattoo on our foreheads. Only gay sex is allowed in WA and you have to take pictures for proof, EVERY TIME. You can't eat meat here and you have to salute the Starbucks fla
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Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahh yes, Switzerland, that infamous one sided war mongering state being protected by the USA.
Maybe if America spent a bit less on defence and a bit more on education posts like yours wouldn't exist.
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Maybe if Europe spent less on making lists excluding America and more on paying their own goddamn bills we could spend less on defense.
What bills? Are you under the impression that national defense spending is a bill owed to another country? Remember the bit about how your schools don't seem to educate you? This is what I'm talking about.
Just remember if you're in Europe, you're never more than five miles from something America rebuilt for you for free.
Actually my entire suburb was cordoned off for 6 hours the other day because if an American bomb which was left behind. Do I get to thank you for that too? Just what did you build for us for free? Your argument is self defeating. Either you're wrong and you didn't build something for free, or you're right
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Inaccurate, as it turns out [quotesfromthepast.com]. Maybe proving the point further?
Re:any city (Score:5, Insightful)
It's single-handledly supporting the dead-beat welfare states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.
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Sustainability (Score:1)
Including something like sustainability is a great way to keep Americans out of any index!
Let us explain you why China is even worse! Even though nobody asked. And 90% of our solar panels come from China.
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China is known to subsidize its solar panel exports. Though the reason for renewable energy not growing in the US likely isn't for the reasons you think:
https://www.theatlantic.com/po... [theatlantic.com]
Ignore the whole red vs blue political nonsense as that's really just a distraction from the overall problem. In other words, it's red tape. What good are cheap solar panels when the real challenge is simply getting permission to use them?
Just begging for .. (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong. (Score:1)
Its obviously us-east-1
That will change (Score:2)
"boasting 34 artificial intelligence companies and 13 Internet of Things companies per 100,000 residents." - Well with stats like this things are about to change in the opposite direction I fear.
I guess traffic management doesn't count (Score:2)
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Drivers in Seattle, home to 27th-worst traffic in world, waste 58 hours a year on roads [komonews.com] - Seattle traffic slowed a whole lot in 2023 [seattletimes.com]
58 hours per year is a little over an hour a week. What's that, like 10, 15 minutes a day? Sounds like a pretty easy commute to me. Or is the article trying to say that people are spending 58 hours more than than they used to in traffic? Maybe the article was written by an AI. I also liked the anecdote about the lady who "changed dogs to spend more time with her partner, family, friends..."
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If you're commuting you're wasting time, irrespective of wether you're doing it in a car, on a train or walking. It's wasted unproductive time.
These aren't useful/valid metrics (Score:3)
And the IoT? The IoT is a raging dumpster fire of security/privacy nightmares...and, oh look, there's even a discussion list aptly called "dumpsterfire" where people are talking about them: Dumpsterfire - the mailing list for IoT security and privacy failures [firemountain.net]. This doesn't quality as "smart" either, and measuring based on the presence of the companies cranking out these products is also not useful.
Better ways to assess "smart" cities might include: use of renewable energy, mass transit coverage and effectiveness, educational outcomes, healthcare affordability, walkability, health of the small/local business ecosystem, utilization of locally-grown farm products, crime rates, programs addressing poverty, access to outdoor resources, etc. These are the things that improve the quality of life for residents (and visitors); these are things that make people want to move there.
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Better ways to assess "smart" cities might include: use of renewable energy, mass transit coverage and effectiveness, educational outcomes, healthcare affordability, walkability, health of the small/local business ecosystem, utilization of locally-grown farm products, crime rates, programs addressing poverty, access to outdoor resources, etc. These are the things that improve the quality of life for residents (and visitors); these are things that make people want to move there.
Thanks for the link to "stocha
Re:These aren't useful/valid metrics (Score:5, Interesting)
Better ways to assess "smart" cities might include: use of renewable energy, mass transit coverage and effectiveness, educational outcomes, healthcare affordability, walkability, health of the small/local business ecosystem, utilization of locally-grown farm products, crime rates, programs addressing poverty, access to outdoor resources, etc. These are the things that improve the quality of life for residents (and visitors); these are things that make people want to move there.
Second reply. The article tries a little of the above, with an attempt to quantify sustainability. Measuring sustainability is of course fraught with assumptions, hand-waving and outright manipulation to get the desired numbers. And yeah, their focus on "AI" and "smart cities" isn't going to do squat for an area's liveability or "smartness." It might trick a few gullible municipalities into wasting resources on such nonsense though.
I was intrigued to see Canberra on the list. Canberra does have excellent walkability, education, outdoor resources etc. Electricity generation across the whole territory has been net-zero since 2019, which interestingly sent electricity prices DOWN when the rest of the country went up in 2022.
The article also mentions broadband speeds, and this is where Canberra really falls down. The broadband is TERRIBLE. 1970s copper has been pressed into service for the last mile in many residential areas and simply cannot handle off-peak loads, let alone in the evenings when everyone tries to stream video. Doubly so when it rains and the old copper gets wet. I could show you screenshots of my 2000+ms ping times to google. Unfortunately the wireless is even worse. I have a letter from our largest wireless carrier (Telstra, built in the 20th century on taxpayer funds, then privatised in the early 2000s) stating that my mobile phone won't work in my house. This is in the nation's capital! No 5G at all, spotty 4G. 3G is actually pretty decent, but that is getting shut off in the next few months so they can make more money by auctioning off the 3G spectrum.
I "work in tech" but am seriously considering moving overseas due to the dire state of the communications infrastructure here in our "smartest city."
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What is truly smart about Canberra is that it nicely bundles all active federal politicians out of the way.
As for shonky NBN connections, well, that's something those federal politicians are to blame for. There could have been fibre to the home almost everywhere, replacing ageing copper infrastructure with something much more maintainable and reliable. But no, that was too good an idea.
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What blows me away is that the proper fibre NBN, which would have benefited ALL Australians*, was dismissed as "too expensive." Now we're spending almost ten times as much money to rent some nuclear submarines, which benefits no Australians, just funnels taxpayers' money to the US and UK military industrial complex. (Not even our OWN military industrial complex!)
It's a joke and I have no doubt the grownup countries are laughing at us. The yanks and brits are laughing all the way to the bank.
It has also comp
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Copper last mile is not the problem when it comes to peak time loads. Every user has their own dedicated copper line to an aggregation point so it makes no difference if one of them is fully loaded or if all of them are fully loaded.
If the upstream capacity available from the aggregation point is overloaded by too many copper tails, it's going to get even more overloaded if you replace those copper last mile tails with fibre.
A copper line can push 80mbps over a short distance, and should do 20 over a much l
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Copper last mile is not the problem when it comes to peak time loads. Every user has their own dedicated copper line to an aggregation point so it makes no difference if one of them is fully loaded or if all of them are fully loaded.
If the upstream capacity available from the aggregation point is overloaded by too many copper tails, it's going to get even more overloaded if you replace those copper last mile tails with fibre.
A copper line can push 80mbps over a short distance, and should do 20 over a much longer run. Netflix recommends 20mbps for streaming 4k video so you'll be fine unless your copper is especially long or you're trying to have multiple 4k/8k streams at once.
My copper connection is as long as they are legally allowed to make it. And, as I'm sure you know, raw download speeds are only part of the story. Consistency is important too, and for anyone doing real work, upload speeds are just as important as downloads. All I know is if I'm on a work call, it tends to fail if anyone else in the house is streaming at the same time.
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And the IoT? The IoT is a raging dumpster fire of security/privacy nightmares...
No one cares. They care about the benefits they see from it. I really couldn't give a shit if the city council parking permit system gets hacked. I care about the benefits of being able to see in real time how busy parking spots are.
That is how IoT works. That is how smart cities work.
Better ways to assess "smart" cities might include: use of renewable energy, mass transit coverage and effectiveness, educational outcomes, healthcare affordability, walkability, health of the small/local business ecosystem, utilization of locally-grown farm products, crime rates, programs addressing poverty, access to outdoor resources, etc.
Many of those are literally either the direct measures used for a smart city or directly enabled through what is being measured in the smart city. But more critically, several of those have nothing to do with a city at all. A
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Sustainable?
We'll see after it keeps getting by more and more hurricanes [cnn.com] which undermine all [nbcnews.com] those [wlrn.org] condos [cbsnews.com].
Smart if you're a machine (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever city is best for people's physical and mental health is the smartest. Lots of green spaces and healthy food is smarter than tech
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You didn't even make it to TFS did you? Smart here is not just about tech. In fact green spaces and health are literally a critical criteria for this list.
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Thanks Joe Xiden for polluting our half-way decent country with a bunch of useless illegal immigrant mouths than spend their time here committing crimes that include MURDER.
Yeah, you tell 'em! All [shorenewsnetwork.com] those [nbcnews.com] immigrants [people.com] committing [nbcnews.com] murder [people.com] need [cbsnews.com] to go.
Bullshit and money (Score:2)
The entire USA isn't in the top-ten of high-infrastructure, environment-friendly, human-centered lifestyles: Remind me again, how great corporatism is, lassez-faire capitalism is, greed is, the entire USA is. 7 of the top-10 cities are in pro-socialism countries.
There are some things, bullshit and money can't achieve.
Woke/DEI nonsense in schools (Score:2)
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I'm always a bit surprised how backward the USA feels when I visit for the most powerful nation on earth.
I think individuality of the USA (I got mine) leaves a lot of your poor really poor and infrastructure, like airports and public spaces, a bit lacking.
Canberra? Fuck off. (Score:2)
Read the sources carefully; NOT about IQ (Score:2)
What does "smart" mean? (Score:2)
These guys are smart enough to name the smartest cities but not smart enough to define what smart means.
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These guys are smart enough to name the smartest cities but not smart enough to define what smart means.
They are smart enough, you're just not smart enough to click through to website and read the OECD report linked which defines the metrics used.
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Smart appears to mean expensive
Hope they know a good ortho doc. (Score:2)
None (Score:2)
criteria (Score:2)
Wait they're determining the "smartest" cities based on how much 5G it has, what global AI and IOT companies are based there and how green it is? ....right.... Apparently these people don't understand the definition of "smart".
The US list also syncs up with cost (Score:2)
The US list also syncs up with the least affordable US cities (except for Oakland?). Oakland syncs up with crime.