The Ukrainian capital has lost six positions in the Smart City Index 2020 over the past year.
Now Kyiv occupies the 98th spot out of 109 places on the list of the most technologically developed cities in the world.
The survey by the Institute for Management Development and Singapore University for Technology and Design indicates how satisfied citizens are with such aspects of life in their cities as health care and safety, activities and opportunities and governance and technologies.
Most Kyivans are discontented with traffic congestion, corrupt city officials and air pollution, the survey reports. Moreover, many respondents said that they aren’t contributing enough to the decision making of the local government and that it’s hard to find affordable housing in Kyiv, where rent often takes over 30% of a monthly salary.
At the same time, most citizens are content with online services like booking tickets to shows, museums and various events. They are also satisfied with online services for job searches.
According to the ranking, Indonesia’s Medan is one position above Kyiv, while Greece’s Athens is one position below.
Singapore leads the ranking. Other top cities are Helsinki, Finland; Zurich, Switzerland; Auckland, New Zealand and Oslo, Norway.
“COVID-19 has shown that technology can make cities thrive and succeed even in times of severe human crisis,” Arturo Bris, professor at the Finance IMD Business School, said in a video released at the same time as the survey.
In 2015, with the help of the Kyiv City Council, activists created the Kyiv Smart City nonprofit. Over the ensuing five years, it has introduced a single electronic ticket for public transport called the Kyiv Smart Card, an electronic petition system, an electronic queue for kindergartens as well as some other smaller projects for Kyiv.
“This year, the city underwent significant changes in the management of the city’s IT infrastructure, which stopped the implementation of new projects in the city… Without radical and rapid changes, this negative trend will only get worse,” the press service of Kyiv Smart City wrote on Facebook.
The management changes the nonprofit writes about might be connected to the dismissal of one of its cofounders, Yuriy Nazarov, from the Kyiv City State Administration in April 2020. He had worked there as a director of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies since 2017.
Around the same time when Nazarov was fired, however, the department where he worked got involved in two suspicious tenders.
The first one was reported in April by municipally owned company Informatika — the company brought the city council’s tender for the purchase of 400 video cameras for measuring body temperature into the spotlight. Later, Ukraine’s State Audit Office declared the tender illegal.
The second scandal happened in March 2020, when the nonprofit reported about the department’s tender held to organize a business trip for 15 officials to the Smart City Expo 2020 congress in Spain. They planned to spend as much as Hr 5 million ($176,800) of budget money. But the tender was canceled after coming under public scrutiny.
