Six cities in Baden-Württemberg are among the top 20 in the latest Smart City Index: Karlsruhe (fifth), Stuttgart (sixth), Heidelberg (tenth), Freiburg (15th), Ulm (16th) and Mannheim (17th). This means that almost one in three of the leading positions goes to the German Southwest. In 2019, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Heidelberg and Mannheim had already been among the 20 best digitized cities in Germany.
For the second time, the digital association Bitkom e.V. has published a Smart City Index – a digital ranking of the 81 major German cities. For this purpose, the experts have collected data on the five key areas of administration, IT and communications, energy and environment, mobility and society. They evaluated, for example, online citizen services, sharing offers for mobility, intelligent traffic light systems and broadband availability.
Bitkom not only compiles an overall ranking, but also assigns positions within the five key areas evaluated: thereby, first place as smartest administration goes to the city of Karlsruhe, while the city of Heidelberg leads in the energy and environment category. Overall, the cities from Baden-Württemberg perform above average in the current index compared to other German states, according to Bitkom.
With the Smart City competitions “Digitale Zukunftskommune@bw”, “Future Communities” and the “Digitalakademie@bw”, Baden-Württemberg is advancing the digitization of the state's municipalities. In summer 2017, "digital@bw" was presented as the first statewide and interdepartmental digitization strategy. More than 70 specific projects are currently being implemented in order to make Baden-Württemberg a leading region for digital change in Europe. This digitization strategy focuses on the areas of Intelligent Mobility of the Future, digital Start-Ups, Business 4.0, education and training in the age of digitization, digital health applications, digital future municipalities and Administration 4.0. In addition, there are cross-sectional areas such as research, development and innovation, sustainability and energy system transformation, data security, data protection and consumer protection.
Source: baden-württemberg.de (in German)
