Austin, Texas takes the top spot in our ranking of smart city potential across the US.

Both the city’s technology infrastructure (87.7 out of 100) and green infrastructure (91.7 out of 100) rank significantly high in comparison to many other cities, with the 8th highest number of publicly accessible EV charging stations (329), the 11th highest per 10,000 people (33.2), and the 8th highest number of ‘Internet of Things’ companies (76) headquartered and operating there.

European cities score lower than the average US city in smart city potential. However, within the top 20 cities overall, we can see that both London (3rd) and Amsterdam (16th) rank in good company as two of the best-performing cities in our analysis.

As the top European city, London scores particularly high on its technology and connectivity infrastructure, and on its green infrastructure. The English capital has nine 5G towers installed, which is more than any other city in our analysis. Also, its average broadband speeds are 82.7mbps, which is better than 65% of the other cities in our analysis with comparable data.

While it lags somewhat behind on its tech-driven job market (51st place), the city does still boast 49,818 tech job vacancies on the market right now — equivalent to 56 per 10,000 people who live there.

While Paris doesn’t score highest on any particular tech and connectivity metric, it scores steadily above average in most of them, meaning its well-rounded score puts it top of this category of our index.

More notable rankings for the French city include the 6th highest number of free public Wifi hotspots (10,663) in a boost to its internet connectivity capabilities, and the 4th highest number of ‘Internet of Things’ companies headquartered there (258).

London’s green infrastructure scores highest for a smart city future in our analysis.

We see London performing best on its overall number of EV chargers, with 2,600 publicly accessible in and around the city, as well as 29.2 per 10,000 people. Also has the highest number of 4,948 green certified buildings, according to the Green Building Information Gateway (GBIG)’s categorizing.

Washington DC, Minneapolis, and Oakland all rank joint-highest for having the widest array of tech job availability. 

Washington boasts 70,567 tech jobs currently hiring (third-highest), while both Minneapolis (6th) and Oakland (7th) have more than 55,000 tech job ads live.

When comparing the number of tech jobs to the number of overall jobs on the market, Minneapolis has 1,293 per 10,000 jobs, Oakland 1,278 per 10,000, and Washington 998 per 1,000.

We began our analysis with a seed list of 100 cities from Europe and the USA (capital and most populated) and originally considered 18 measurements/indicators related to the OECD’s recommendations for smart cities.

Our final ranking of indicators was narrowed down to 11 to ensure like-for-like comparisons between cities.

Each metric was scored and normalized out of 100 — is equally weighted to a score out of 100 for their parent categories: technology and connectivity infrastructure, sustainability infrastructure, and the tech job-driven market before a final overall score per city were given.