The IMD Smart City Index is probably the most quoted smart city ranking in the world. Published by the IMD business school in Lausanne, it ranks cities from 1 to 148, awards credit-style ratings from AAA to D, and reliably makes headlines when mayors celebrate a climb or explain away a slip. It is serious, respected work. But it's worth understanding what it actually measures — and who it leaves out.

How the index works

The index is built on perceptions. In each city, around 120 residents are surveyed about how they experience their city — its infrastructure and the technology available to them, across health and safety, mobility, activities, opportunities and governance. To smooth out noise, each year's score blends three years of survey answers, with older years counting less. Cities are then grouped by their country's level of development, and rated against the other cities in their group.

That design tells you something genuinely valuable: how a city feels to the people who live there. But notice what it doesn't tell you. It doesn't check what a city actually has — it asks a small sample how they feel about it. Roughly 120 voices stand in for a city of millions. The three-year blend means this year's rating still carries the mood of two years ago. And the AAA-to-D ratings compare a city only against others in its development group — not against the world.

148 cities. What about the rest?

The bigger issue is simpler: the list has 148 cities on it, and the world has thousands. Birmingham and Manchester make the cut; Bradford, Leeds and Newcastle don't. Neither do hundreds of ambitious mid-sized cities across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas that are investing hard in becoming smarter — and have no independent way to show it.

For those cities, the consequence is real. Rankings drive headlines, headlines shape reputations, and reputations move investment and talent. A city that isn't ranked can't climb. It can spend millions on digital services, clean transport and open data — and remain invisible, simply because no survey team ever came to ask.

How we measure differently

Citymirror takes the opposite approach on almost every point. Where the IMD index asks how residents feel, we check what a city verifiably has: live transport information, air quality monitoring, open data services, digital government — evidence gathered from public sources, with every finding linked back to where it was found, so anyone can check any score.

Where the index covers 148 cities, we already assess hundreds — and any city can be added, because assessment doesn't depend on flying in a survey. Where the index updates once a year on a three-year blend, our picture refreshes continuously, so a new sensor network or a launched data portal shows up in weeks, not editions. Where ratings are relative to a development group, our scores are absolute: the checklist is published, each item is marked as present, partial or missing, and the score means the same thing in Lagos as it does in London.

And where traditional rankings own their methodology, ours is open. You can read exactly what's being measured, disagree with it — and build your own checklist, apply it to the cities you care about, and publish it for others to improve.

Two different questions

None of this makes the IMD index wrong. "How do residents feel about their city?" is a question worth asking, and IMD asks it well. But "what does this city actually have, what is it missing, and how does it truly compare?" is a different question — and for the thousands of cities that will never appear on a 148-city list, it's the one that matters. Every city deserves to be measured, not just the famous ones. Now every city can be.