Singapore has been deemed as the smartest city in the world for the third time in a row, as per this year’s Smart City Index. The Smart City Index takes into account input from the cities’ residents of how technology had improved their lives. About 120 residents from each city were surveyed in July this year.

Dr Bruno Lanvin, president of IMD’s Smart City Observatory, said in a statement that Singapore’s achievement is largely due to the policies it pursued at both the city and national level particularly in e-government services, education and human-centric urban strategies.

He mentioned that the Republic had gone through the Sars crisis and was better prepared to face the current Covid-19 pandemic as compared to other cities around the world. He also mentioned that the higher degree of social cohesion was also a factor, as well as the availability of digital facilities (typically apps) that allowed the close monitoring of how the virus was circulating.

However, he mentioned, that it is still too early to infer from the findings how the pandemic had impacted the survey participants in Singapore. In IMD’s evaluation, participants in each city were asked questions on their ideas of existing infrastructure and technological provisions and services available to them. These were broken down into five key areas: health and safety, mobility, activities, opportunities, and governance.

Survey participants were also asked to select five out of 15 priority areas, such as affordable housing or health services, for their city. For this year’s rankings, the final score for each city was computed using the answers from residents surveyed this year and in the past two years, with the most weight given to recent replies and the least to those recorded in 2019.

The rankings also took into account economic and social data taken from the UN Development Index, which ranks countries on the basis of health, education and living standards. The team behind this year’s Smart City Index said the findings showed that the top concern worldwide is access to affordable housing. But access to better air quality and health services has become a greater priority in cities worldwide since the Covid-19 pandemic occurred.