Page 17 - International Standards to Shape Smart Sustainable Cities: The Case of Moscow

Implementing ITU-T International Standards to shape Smart Sustainable Cities - The case of Moscow

Global Smart Sustainable Cities Index

ITU’s Global Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC) Index is currently being developed under a
cooperation agreement between the ITU and Smart Dubai. The ITU SSC Index is based
on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC) that were
developed with input from 16 United Nations (UN) agencies, Dubai and 50 other cities
under the framework of the U4SSC Initiative.
Input is also being gathered from other external researchers and scientists from
universities, institutes and think tanks spanning different fields of research, e.g.
political and social science, economics, institutional economics, sociology,
mathematics, statistics, computer science, philosophy, as well as from city planners,
architects and environmentalists, and others.
The ITU SSC Index came about as a result of the need to:

 measure progress;
 make transparent the different levels of economic integration, geographic
location and sizes of cities;
 evaluate and integrate different levels of quantitative and qualitative data;
 make these data comparable and visible with state-of-the-art scientific
methods;
 transform/translate scientific outcomes into easily-understandable graphics
and numbers; and
 make outcomes/results public for users (e.g. citizens and governments).

Furthermore, the ITU SSC Index is expected to fulfil certain outcomes. Specifically, the
ITU SSC Index will:
 set new standards to compare cities;
 be the first international set of coherent metrics;
 uniquely coordinate data input from all international resources (e.g. UN
Statistical Division, World Bank, OECD) and the evaluated KPI city data utilizing
state of the art scientific methods;
 benchmark the cities’ contribution to sustainability and smartness, as well as
their ongoing efforts towards implementing the United Nations (UN)
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs);
 be a highly useful tool for any city to improve, advance and further develop its
performance related to society, economy and the environment; and
 allow cities to learn from each other in a transparent manner.

5
Box 2: ITU’s Global Smart Sustainable Cities Index

5 Kolm (2018)

5