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, the IMD Smart City Index 2026 finds.
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, published by the IMD World Competitiveness Centre (WCC), indicate that smartness is not only about the latest technology. Higher overall performance tends to coincide with stronger citizen perceptions of good governance, transparency, and effective digital services.
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. “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.
The data also shows that cities can be affluent and technologically connected while remaining, in the terms that matter most to residents, untrustworthy. Athens, ranked 139th, and Rome, ranked 143rd, both record anti-corruption scores below 0.25 and citizen participation scores lower than many Sub-Saharan African cities.
A unique 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 their Subnational Human Development Index measure.
The WCC defines a Smart City as one that strikes a good balance between its economic prowess (e.g., jobs and business activity), applied technology, environmental concerns, and inclusiveness to facilitate a high quality of life for its citizens.
