Short Abstract

In this session, we discuss the criteria for classifying a city as “smart” and propose an integrated evaluation of smart city rankings that reveals technocentric limits and improves sustainability outcomes aligned with the UN 2030 Agenda, demonstrating this through a case study in Brazil.

Description

Brazil presents a highly unequal urban landscape marked by deep regional disparities, heterogeneous levels of digital infrastructure, and long-standing inequities in access to public services. In this context, smart city initiatives have expanded rapidly and gained visibility through rankings that reward digitalization, innovation ecosystems and technological sophistication. However, these rankings often influence policy priorities by signaling prestige and competitiveness, even though they may not reflect the social and environmental realities of most municipalities. This creates a unique environment to investigate how evaluation frameworks can reinforce—or challenge—policy agendas in complex and unequal urban systems typical of the Global South.

The SDGs offer a comprehensive and normative framework for evaluating urban development by integrating social justice, environmental protection, economic resilience and inclusive governance. However, despite their global adoption, the extent to which SDG principles are incorporated into local policy instruments varies widely. In Brazil, many municipalities face difficulties aligning technological innovation with social and environmental priorities. SDGs related to health, education, gender equality, climate action, inequality reduction and sustainable urban development provide a robust lens to assess whether the “smartness” promoted by rankings effectively contributes to broad-based well-being. By grounding the evaluation in the SDGs, this study positions sustainability not as an optional component of urban intelligence, but as its ethical and developmental foundation.

The proposal compares indicators from the Connected Smart Cities ranking (Urban Systems, 2024) with municipal performance on all 17 SDGs using the Sustainable Development Index of Cities (IDSC). Through this evaluation perspective, we identify that being ranked as a smart city does not guarantee superior SDG performance, particularly in social SDGs such as health, education, gender equality, and inequality reduction. Several non-ranked municipalities outperform ranked ones in these domains. Only SDGs related to innovation, infrastructure and environmental management show partial alignment with smart city indicators.

These results reveal structural weaknesses in the evaluative models used to guide public policies in Brazil. Current rankings are dominated by infrastructure and technocentric indicators, which provide an incomplete basis for policymaking. From an evaluation-use perspective, the findings highlight three barriers:

(1) misaligned incentives created by reputational rankings;

(2) contextual disparities that undermine cross-municipal comparability; and

(3) fragmentation between evaluation domains that results in weak or misleading policy signals.

Despite these barriers, the evaluation also identifies opportunities for policy improvement. By exposing inconsistencies between the “smart” label and actual SDG performance, the study supports the development of adaptive, integrative evaluation tools that align technological innovation with social and environmental goals. The proposed model, inspired by the SDG “wedding cake,” integrates urban intelligence indicators with sustainability outcomes, offering municipalities a path to revise priorities and strengthen public policy coherence.

Overall, the work argues that evaluations capable of influencing policy must go beyond technology-based performance measures and incorporate multidimensional, territorially informed perspectives that reflect the complexity of urban systems. Such approaches enable more just, sustainable and evidence-based urban policymaking.