Bucharest tops ranking of smart city projects, report shows
Taken together, Bucharest’s general city hall and the capital’s sectorial city halls ran the most smart city projects, according to the Scanning Smart Cities in Romania report for 2022.
Broken down across individual city halls, Cluj-Napoca (63) becomes the city with the most numerous smart city projects, followed by Iași (56), and Bucharest’s general city hall (54).
Alba Iulia, dominant in the ranking for the past years, drops to fourth place in 2022, with only 49 projects. Sibiu and Bucharest’s Sector 4 tie for fifth, each with 35 smart city projects. Oradea and Timișoara, both located in Western Romania, similarly share sixth place, each with 26 projects. Arad and Slănic Moldova also tie for seventh, with 25 projects a piece, followed by Bistrița (20), Hârșova (19), and Brasov and Botoșani, each with 18.
In total, cities in Romania ran 470 smart city projects so far.
“In the 2022 report, we see that the current stage of the Smart City concept in Romania has gone beyond the pilot projects phase,” says Cornel Bărbuț, CEO of Vegacomp Consulting.
He believes that despite their promise, smart city projects will not become the norm as long as personnel in the central and local administration lack the necessary skills for running them. "This is why we stress, once again, the need to allocate resources for project management and IT&C (IT and connectivity),” Bărbuț added.
Among middle-sized cities, Alba Iulia is the strongest performer in terms of the number of smart city projects (49), followed by Sibiu (35) and Oradea (26), while Hârșova (19), Avrig (14) and Aleșd (10) take the podium in the category for small towns.
The Smart Cities report, compiled by Vegacomp Consulting, has reached its sixth edition this year. The ranking separates projects into six categories: smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance, each designed according to EU standards of reporting.
Similar to the previous edition of the report, most smart city projects fall within the smart mobility category. This year, 322 projects were focused on the modernization of transport and traffic management, up from 188 in 2020 and 260 last year.
Smart mobility is followed by the smart governance category, with 238 projects, smart living (217), smart economy (130), smart environment (59), and smart people (35). The last two categories show a slight decrease in the number of projects.
Founded in 2004, Vegacomp Consulting offers consultancy services for various businesses and sectors, including major local telecommunications operators RCS&RDS and Telekom.
(Photo source: Manop Lohkaew | Dreamstime.com)
