First Domestic Introduction of Smart City Certification System... City Selection in August

Rated as Grade 5... Certification for Grades 1-3
Applications Open Next Month... Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport "Actively Supporting"

[Asia Economy Reporter Moon Jiwon] From August, smart cities equipped with innovation, institutional environment, service technology, and infrastructure will receive 'Smart City Certification' from the government.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport announced on the 5th that it will launch the '2021 Smart City Certification Contest' to certify smart cities at the government level.

The Smart City Certification system is a program that assesses the level of domestic smart cities through smart city performance indicators and grants certification and grades to enable comparison between cities.

Major foreign countries and companies have already introduced smart city diagnostic indicators to evaluate the level of each city and use the results for policy promotion and external publicity.

Representative examples include the European Union (EU)'s European Smart City Index, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)'s smart city standards, and Cisco's smart city indicators.

Currently, there is no standard evaluation method to understand the status and level of smart cities in Korea. As a result, domestic smart cities have faced issues such as being undervalued overseas.

Accordingly, the Ministry of Land recognized the need for a smart city evaluation and certification system based on smart city indicators and established the legal basis for introducing the certification system in the Smart City Act in 2017.

In 2019, a pilot certification contest was conducted targeting 37 local governments with populations over 300,000. As a result, Seoul, Daejeon, Daegu, Ulsan, Sejong, Goyang, Gimhae, Bucheon, Suwon, and Changwon obtained pilot certification.

The Smart City Certification is granted to local governments that demonstrate high innovation, well-established governance and institutional environment, and smart service technology well applied to local conditions.

The certification targets are divided into large cities with populations over 500,000 and small to medium-sized cities with populations under 500,000 for evaluation.

The evaluation is conducted by the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, which forms an evaluation committee of experts, and consists of document review and on-site inspection. Proposals from local governments will be accepted by the end of next month, and after evaluation, certified cities will be selected in August.

Each local government will be rated on a 5-grade scale, with certification granted to grades 1 through 3. Certified local governments will have the opportunity to promote themselves as excellent smart cities domestically and internationally.

Choi Imrak, Director of Urban Policy at the Ministry of Land, said, "The Smart City Certification system, introduced for the first time in Korea, will be an opportunity to elevate the level of smart cities in our country," and added, "We will actively support cities that receive Smart City Certification to grow as representative smart cities of Korea."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.