U4SSC Index
The first meeting of the Thematic Group on the United for Smart Sustainable City Index was attended by over 75 participants from all of the world.
The “United for Smart Sustainable Cities” (U4SSC) is a United Nations initiative coordinated by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). U4SSC is supported by 13 UN Agencies and Programmes to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 11: "Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable". U4SSC serves as the global platform to advocate for public policy and to encourage the use of ICTs to facilitate and ease the transition to smart sustainable cities.
As part of the United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) Initiative, ITU, UNECE and UNU-EGOV organized the First meeting of the Thematic Group of the U4SSC Smart Sustainable City Index that was kindly hosted by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology, Republic of Austria on 13 December 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
This meeting brought together leading specialists in the field, from city planners to engineers, designers, policy-makers, government officials, regulators, academia and standards experts.
The main objective of the Thematic Group was to present a first draft of the methodology of the U4SSC Index that provides measurements and insights in the focus areas of smartness, sustainability, environment, economy and society and culture in cities.
It was noted that for individual cities there is a possibility to see the development over time by using the weights of the overall data from the first basic year.
The U4SSC index which is currently being developed is an overall ranking. It was noted that cities will be clustered by geography size and economic integration. The weights are data driven and the same weights are applied to each city.
It was pointed out that the Index will be more credible and transparent if data is made publicly available. In this regard, discussions on the above will continue in view of the development of the qualitative aspects for the second draft version of the methodology of the U4SSC Index.
The technical part of the methodology was presented and discussed. Comments received were supportive of the present draft and the Leader was requested to submit a second version of the draft methodology for further discussion.
The following timeline was agreed and may be updated in due course as necessary: June 2020 for the launch of the U4SSC index
The second meeting of the Thematic Group on the U4SSC Index will be held at ITU Headquarters in the first quarter of 2020. ITU will send out an invitation in early January 2020 through the mailing list.