Page 50 - U4SSC Factsheet, Valencia, Spain, June 2020

• Valencia and its fellow aspiring smart sustainable cities should implement the recommendations and
best practices mentioned in this Factsheet to improve the applicability of the KPIs across their cities/
regions and accelerate the achievement of their SSC goals in line with international instruments
(such as the Paris Agreement, Connect 2030 Agenda, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and
the New Urban Agenda).
• The vital knowledge gained through Valencia’s experience in implementing the U4SSC KPIs will
continue to be a part of ongoing efforts to make not only the U4SSC KPIs, but also U4SSC’s upcoming
Smart Sustainable Cities Index the most effective methods to measure progress and to provide
guidance to cities around the world on their journey to becoming smarter and sustainable.
• Valencia’s reported KPIs will also feed into ITU’s new maturity model. Recommendation ITU-T
Y.4904: ‘Smart Sustainable City Maturity Model (SSC-MM)’ is an additional tool to not only set
and measure performance levels of each KPI by Valencia and other cities, but to also measure the
progress of other key dimensions for the development of a SSC including strategy, ICT infrastructure,
data, services and applications and assessments, as further detailed in the box below.

Smart Sustainable City Maturity Model

The Smart Sustainable City Maturity Model (SSC-MM) defines five levels of maturity in the
process of becoming a smart and sustainable city with each level achieved being a higher level
of maturity. The requirement to reach the intended maturity level is to achieve the target KPI
values set for each maturity level.

As an example, for KPI Household Internet Access, a level 1 maturity level could be to collect
the initial benchmark data. The further four levels could then be set as performance levels
such as level 2 achieved at 30% access, level 3 at 50% access, level 4 at 70% access and level 5
at 90% access.

This can then be overlaid with maturity level performance for the other dimensions to provide
insight into the issues that need to be addressed within each city to become smarter and
more sustainable.

Valencia and other cities are encouraged to use Recommendation ITU-T Y.4904 as a framework
to determine their interim target values for KPIs by taking into consideration their priorities,
constraints, resources and optimal KPI performance levels. The SSC-MM is another tool that
can be used to communicate progress to stakeholders, to help them develop an SSC strategy
to encourage the effective use of ICTs.

More information on the SDGs, the U4SSC initiative and the U4SSC Smart Sustainable Cities Index can
be found in the Appendix.

At this time, the ITU would like to invite cities around the world to implement the U4SSC KPIs for
SSC. Using the U4SSC KPI definitions and data-collection methodologies, all cities will be in a better

44 U4SSC Factsheet | Valencia, Spain | June 2020