How “smart” are Latin American cities?

This paper argues for the use of composite indicators to assess the “smartness” of the management of cities and illustrates it in a comparison of 6 large Latin American cities. The analysis is based on 6 dimensions commonly used to define city smartness in the recent academic literature in terms of technology, physical and human capital as well as policy. It quantifies each of these dimensions with relatively easily available public data to ensure the transparency of the evaluation and of its updating. The quantification required a normalization of the data and the computation of weighting factors for each indicator to delete redundant information since various dimensions used to characterize smartness in the literature are correlated. The results allow an evaluation of individual areas in which each city can improve as compared to best practice. The synthesis of these multiple dimensions into a composite single score index is then used to rank the cities on their overall performance as well. All performances are benchmarked against Amsterdam’s performance, considered to be best practice in many dimensions. The Latin American cities covered by the sample, including Santiago, the best regional performer, are found to significantly lag best practice, although on some dimensions, some of the cities do better than the benchmark.