Hamburg remains Germany's smartest city

"Hamburg's position in both studies shows that the Hanseatic city is on a good course with its digital strategy. We consistently focus on residents to improve the standard of living and to offer companies an attractive location," said Christian Pfromm, Chief Digital Officer of Hamburg. Pfromm stressed: "We want to use digitalisation to promote cohesion and social participation." Last month, the senate chancellery‘s Office for IT and Digitisation won the 2020 e-government competition for the digitalisation and modernisation of public administration. Hamburg’s digital strategy topped the "Best Co-operation Project 2020" category for its exemplary interdepartmental and interagency strategy.  

Hamburg proved the overall leader of the Bitkom study and scored 96.8 points for mobility and 93.4 for society making the city a "role model of multimodality". The city’s HVV Switch app, which calculates the fastest route among all modes of public transport including sharing offers, was also praised and for allowing users to book tickets as well. Residents of Hamburg can also "inform themselves and have their say digitally" e.g. on the transparency portal (Transparenzportal), (Bürgerbeteiligungsplattform) or Citizen Participation Platform, the study found. Those interested can also stream debates in Hamburg's Parliament live from sessions in the assembly. Autonomous measurement vehicles that survey the depth of the Elbe River and the port basin illustrate a successful and innovative smart city, the study noted. Bitkom Research had evaluated 81 cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants each in terms of administration, IT and communication, energy and environment, mobility and society for the Smart City Index 2020.

The degree of digitalisation in Hamburg comes to 45 per cent, according to the ranking drawn up by Haselhorst Associates and put the city in first place and well above the national average. The previous leader, Cologne, came second with 44.1 per cent. Hamburg also proved convincing in terms of strategy (93 per cent) and infrastructure (81 per cent). The extent of digitalisation is based on six other areas: mobility, energy and environment, buildings and neighbourhoods, health, education and administration. Hamburg scored well above the national average in all of the criteria. Haselhorst Associates had analysed 403 cities with over 30,000 inhabitants each for the Smart City Ranking 2020. 
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