Residents in high-performing urban centers 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 and published by the IMD World Competitiveness Center (WCC), found 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.
The top three cities in this year’s ranking – among a global sample of 148 – were Zurich (first), Oslo (second), and Geneva (third). AlUla jumped 27 places while Washington DC rose by 23. Big drops were seen from Bordeaux (down 19), Lyon (also down 19), and Ottawa (down 18, together with Shenzhen).
“The most advanced urban centers, where citizens feel happiest, are not necessarily 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.”
Across the 148 cities surveyed, scores in the structures pillar are a stronger and more consistent predictor of overall smart performance than technology scores. The top cities, Zurich, Oslo, Geneva, and Copenhagen, all lead on institutions, infrastructure, and structure-related indicators, with technology-related indicators performing less strongly.
The reverse is true of almost every city in the bottom 20 of the 2026 ranking – including Rome, Athens, São Paulo, Amman, and Nairobi – which have a higher average technology score than structures score.
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 sets 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 on their “livability”. To compare like-for-like, cities are grouped (1-4) according to the UN’s Subnational Human Development Index results.
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 quality of life for its citizens.
“The best-performing cities have discovered that effective governance is less about centralizing power and more about facilitating cooperation. They create platforms and processes that allow different stakeholders to share information, coordinate investments, and pursue common goals without sacrificing the flexibility needed for local innovation,” wrote the report’s authors Christos Cabolis and Fabian Grimm.
What cities decide to do with the data will depend on how well they absorb the message that the central question around urban planning in 2026 is no longer “can we build a smart city?” but rather “should we trust the ones being built?”
New or returning cities this year were Tianjin and Zhuhai in China, Hafar Al Batin and Hail in Saudi Arabia, and San Salvador in El Salvador.
