At a glance
- Who: IMD World Competitiveness Centre (WCC).
- What: WCC has published the IMD Smart City Index 2026, which sees Zurich retain the top spot.
- Why: To assess the progress of smart cities around the world. IMD WCC defines a smart city as one that strikes a good balance between its economic prowess, applied technology, environmental concerns, and inclusiveness to facilitate a high quality of life for its citizens.
- Where: WCC surveyed residents in 148 global cities.
Transparency, infrastructure and public trust are key to urban success, according to the annual ranking, published by the IMD World Competitiveness Centre.
Zurich has retained the top spot in the seventh edition of the annual IMD Smart City Index 2026.
The index, published by the IMD World Competitiveness Centre (WCC), ranks Oslo in second place, Geneva in third, while London and Copenhagen enter the top five, at fourth and fifth, respectively.
Transparency and trust
The report, entitled The Quest for Trust and Transparency, assesses five new cities in 2026 – Tianjin and Zhuhai in China, Hafar Al Batin and Hail in Saudi Arabia, and San Salvador in El Salvador, bringing the total to 148.
The results also reveal that that residents in high-performing cities tend to perceive more transparency in their cities and be actively engaged in the processes that shape their quality of life.
Cities whose residents agree that “information on local government decisions is easily accessible” rank higher, and those where residents report contributing to decision-making tend to show higher satisfaction across multiple areas.
“The most advanced urban centres, where citizens feel happiest, are not necessarily those distinguished by their utopian skylines, visible sensor networks, or pure technological sophistication,” said Arturo Bris, director of the WCC, which is part of the IMD university institute. “Instead, they stand out for how effectively they align governance structures, sustainability priorities, public investment decisions, and perhaps most importantly, the cultivation of citizen trust.”
India’s cities remain in the lower third of the Index, despite major technology hubs such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, where the citizen-reported technology scores are among the highest worldwide. This is because their governance and participation scores lag behind the digital economy.
Across the 148 cities surveyed, scores in the structures pillar are a stronger and more consistent predictor of overall smart performance than technology scores. Almost every city in the bottom 20 of the 2026 ranking – including Rome, Athens, São Paulo, Amman, and Nairobi – has a higher average technology score than structures score.
The reverse is true of the top cities: Zurich, Oslo, Geneva, and Copenhagen all lead on institutions, infrastructure, and structures-related indicators, with technology-related indicators performing less strongly.
A feature of IMD’s report is that it puts aside hard data to focus on the human aspect of city living, computing the answers of a survey of about 400 inhabitants per city to rank cities by their “liveability.” To compare like with like, cities are grouped (1-4) according to its Subnational Human Development Index measure.
The WCC defines a smart city as one that strikes a good balance between its economic prowess (for example, jobs and business activity), applied technology, environmental concerns, and inclusiveness to facilitate a high quality of life for its citizens.
To find out more, go to Smart City Index 2026.
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Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: Smart Cities World, 31.03.2026
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