Why Measuring Wellbeing is Fundamental to Becoming a Smart City

By Shweta Babbar, Chief Transformation Officer, Glen Eira City Council

There are various definitions of smart cities but the one that most resonates with me is—A truly smart city improves the quality of life for citizens and visitors by using data, technology, and innovation. As you would have realised, the emphasis is on ‘quality of life’ which can be measured through popular social data frameworks.

Smart cities consult communities to understand what their vision is; ideate with them to find collaborative solutions and partner to create positive changes in their neighbourhood.

Inevitably, smart cities is no longer just a buzz word. It is, being smart about your resources, strategies, projects, actions, and measuring the outcomes. For those in public service, smart cities is a framework to embed data or evidence proactively before strategies are matured and projects are initiated. It triggers an opportunity to provide a divergent lens to performance measures deployed by all levels of government. Measures like—community happiness, social resilience, wellbeing and economic prosperity are crucial to managing the health and wellbeing of community and acting where the highest impact is.

Here are top three insights that you can derive by establishing social data framework:

Emotional insights can help you interpret how people are feeling and what brings them together.

A truly smart city improves the quality of life for citizens and visitors by using data, technology, and innovation

This further apprises programming and future investment into activities that have greater impact on people’s emotional connections.

Social resilience insights can be derived by overlaying various datasets to better understand various groups that might be more vulnerable than others and to develop appropriate social support programs.

Wellbeing insight can help you better understand the physical and mental health of your community and enable programming that is more relevant and effective to the end-users

For number of years, the local government sector has been focussed on digital transformation to improve services, financial and social aspects of urban life. We are starting to see a shift with few early adopters who are starting to gauge wellbeing, happiness, and social resilience. The social analytics is steadily providing an innovative framework to better ascertain the needs of the community and how best to measure the impact. The framework supports identifying focus areas proactively and enables developing programs and strategies that are more compelling.

I am very excited about the opportunities of using big data to make better decisions to improve quality of life of our citizens by designing operating models that are more in-line with their sentiments. An unstoppable process of social data innovation has evoked an endless cycle of reinvention and it can only get better from hereon.