A FEW years ago, a city in Metro Manila claimed to be the cleanest city, despite the fact that its rivers were still heavily polluted.
Then another city claimed to be “smart”, based on the fact that its CCTV cameras are now connected to a centralized monitoring center.
Obviously, what we have here is a situation where in claims are just being made unilaterally, without using a set of approved standards and possibly without peer validation too.
That seems to be the situation in local organic certification nowadays. It seems that anyone could just go ahead and sell organic foods, without a real certification process and without a generally accepted standard that should be the basis for their claims.
I remember that over 20 years ago, I was faced with a similar problem when I was a Commissioner of the Y2K Commission.
At that time, any one could just claim to be Y2K compliant, without a real basis for their claims. As a solution to that problem, I proposed the adoption of the standards of the British Standards Institute (BSI), arguing that there was no more time to create our own set of standards.
After the Commission approved my proposal, all claims of compliance were based on BSI, without any question on what the basis of their claims would be.
How I wish that there would be a clear standard in order to determine if a city is really “smart” or not. You get it right however, that the standards have to be generally acceptable, and it has to be nationally recognized, if it is not yet globally accepted as well.
As far as I know, there is no official global standard that would determine whether a city is “smart” or not, but there is already a general agreement as to what the criteria should be.
As far as I know also, there is still an active debate as to which one is really desirable, to be a “smart” city, a “green” city or a “safe” city. As of now, I already prefer the third choice, because of my belief that a “safe” city should be a “smart” city in the first place, because a city could not be “safe” if it is not “smart”.
To add to that a city could also not be “safe” if it is not “green”. That is because it would be prone to many disasters if it is not “green”. If a city is not “green”, it would certainly be polluted thus making it not “safe”. (To be continued)/PN
