Daegu goes digital: Korean metropolis latest to adopt ITU’s smart city KPIs

By ITU News

Around the world, forward-looking cities are tracking their digital transformation progress in tandem with goals to reduce climate impact, improve health and maximize everyone’s socio-economic opportunities.
The Republic of Korea’s electronic manufacturing hub and third-largest urban centre, Daegu, is the latest to share its experience in adopting key performance indicators (KPIs) for smart sustainable cities in line with ensuring a better global future.

Officially known as Daegu Metropolitan City, the metropolis joins over 150 cities worldwide to implement the KPIs, linked closely with the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations for 2030.

These KPIs have been developed under the umbrella of the United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiative, supported by 17 United Nations agencies and programmes.

By adopting the initiative’s recommended KPIs, Daegu has also become the first Korean city actively charting out its path for a smart and sustainable future. At the core of its smart city vision, Daegu has adopted a people-oriented approach for urban planning and management, to ensure quality of life for its inhabitants and to safeguard their interests.

As part of a national innovation project, Daegu enjoys an annual smart city budget of USD 17 million. The City’s Smart City Plan (2021 – 2025) lays the foundation for boosting citizen’s happiness and supporting local industries, with the aim of creating “Smart Daegu”.

Tools for self-assessment

Based on International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standards, the U4SSC indicators can help cities set local priorities for driving sustainable digital transformation. They can, for example, help local businesses identify innovation opportunities or assist municipal leaders by informing new policies.

The KPIs provide a common reporting framework that other cities around the world can readily replicate.

The U4SSC case study and KPI assessment of Daegu follows a similar structure to the already published case studies and assessments, ranging from global hubs like Dubai, and Moscow to smaller municipalities like Bizerte, (Tunisia) and Pully (Switzerland).

All U4SSC KPI evaluations are independently verified, and the relevant reports produced confirm that each city’s data follows the stipulated collection methodology and provides insights into a city’s progress on becoming smarter and more sustainable, while highlighting the core initiatives and actions geared towards their overarching smart city plans.

Cultivating urban expertise

UN4SSC, together with national administrations, UN agencies and programmes, municipal leaders, and leading global experts, is building a comprehensive approach to smart city development, looking at both KPI evaluations and wider national contexts for smart city planning and action.

The initiative has set out to provide expert guidance on several topics, covered within different thematic groups. These include:

• Digital transformation for people-oriented cities;
• Lessons learned from building urban economic resilience at city level during and after COVID-19;
• Innovative financing for Smart Sustainable Cities projects;
• ​Guiding principles for artificial intelligence in cities;
• Procurement guidelines for Smart Sustainable Cities and
• City platforms

Smart city leaders at GSS

People-centred digital transformation requires urban stakeholders to prioritize the needs and concerns of citizens over the implementation of technologies across various business segments.

A keynote session and panel discussion at the Global Standards Symposium explores how digital innovations can be leveraged to meet the demands of inhabitants, build resilience within different sectors of smart cities and communities, and initiate digital transformation to tackle global challenges within the urban ecosystem.

The case study for the city of Daegu was also released today at the Global Standards Symposium, during the U4SSC Ceremony for Cities.

Learn more and register – free and open to all.

Image credit: SungHun Kim via Unsplash