A recent study in npj Urban Sustainability analysed 61 smart city strategy documents from major German cities against 30 criteria for sustainable-digital transformation, sorting them into front-runners, middle range, and laggards. The result should make urban technocrats rather mercilessly uncomfortable: everyone has learned to say “sustainability”; far fewer have learned to build it into strategy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-026-00418-w
What separates the front-runners is not the digital vocabulary, the dashboards, or the ritual invocation of sensors that consultants bill by the hour. It is governance: alignment with supra-regional policy frameworks, citizen participation that is institutionalized rather than decorative, and impact measurement built into the strategy itself — so that when promises fail, the failure has an address before the next press release, not just another invoice in disguise.
The most revealing finding lies in the regression analysis. Population size? Not significant. Economic development? Not significant. Political composition of the city council? Not significant. The only factor positively associated with an integrated strategy was participation in the smart city funding programme — external money arriving with conditions and reporting obligations. Cities did not do better because they were big, rich or governed by the “right” party. They did better when someone upstream forced them to think before they spent.
Yes, the study scores documents, not outcomes. That makes the result worse, not better: these are the cities’ self-portraits, written with every incentive to flatter, and many still could not fake coherence. A city does not become smart by collecting data, any more than a university becomes excellent by collecting rankings. It becomes smarter when digitalization is forced to serve social justice, ecological responsibility and democratic accountability. Strip that away, and the “smart city” is the most expensive euphemism urban marketing invented.
P.S. - But perhaps Germany is not the scandal here. Perhaps Germany is the warning. If this happens with a national Smart City Charter, federal funding and a reputation for administrative seriousness, imagine what the same audit — if anyone dared to run it — would find where "smart city" is just a password for EU money — and no one checks the work.
