Frankfurt's local politicians could probably expect a similar assessment in other policy areas: the strategies have been written down and are promising, but it takes far too long to realize all the beautiful plans.

The city has now cashed in on the unfortunate testimony for the topic of digitization.

Again, how to add.

Inga Janovic

Editor in the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and responsible editor of the business magazine Metropol.

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For several years now, the Bavarian-based management consultancy Haselhorst and the Bitkom business association have been investigating the status of digitization in German cities, which is often summarized under the term Smart City.

Both have now published their results for this year.

Their brief summary from the Hessian point of view: The most digital city in the state is and will remain Darmstadt, the small Bad Nauheim is a kind of insider tip, and Frankfurt does not get beyond the upper midfield.

There is also some progress in the Main metropolis with the expansion of the digital infrastructure, the online offers of the administration and the introduction of software for more intelligent traffic control.

In the Bitkom study, the city even moved up 14 places to 33.

But in a number of other municipalities things are going faster, according to the studies they are moving past the Hessians with more vigour.

Still low fiberglass

In this sense, the smart city ranking from Bavaria, which measures the progress on the way to becoming a smart city in percentages and uses ten fields of action from strategy and mobility to education and health, states that the degree of digitization in the city of Frankfurt within a year increased from 25.5 to 26.1 percent.

In terms of strategy, infrastructure and digital mobility, the authors in Frankfurt even see a step backwards.

In the Bitkom study, too, Frankfurt gets a point deduction for this, among other things, because there is a lot of broadband, but there is still little fiber optics in the house connections.

According to the authors from Haselhorst, who have evaluated tens of thousands of data from and about the municipalities, there has been a little progress in the field of trade and economy,

otherwise the city would have remained on the status quo of 2021.

It has therefore not launched any new digital offers in the education sector, health care or in the energy sector for its citizens, and still rarely uses smart technologies for the energy sector or the operation of its buildings.

This puts Frankfurt in 116th place in this nationwide comparison of 407 cities (it was 78th in 2021), the worst ranking among major German cities.

After all, one cannot be satisfied even with those who are further along, above all Hamburg, which leads the study with a value of 47.7 percent.

"Even after five years of surveying, none of the cities examined managed to get beyond a degree of digitization of 50 percent," says the management consultancy.

One consolation for Frankfurt: three out of four municipalities have not yet reached a quarter digitization, i.e. a degree of 25 percent.

Darmstadt is well beyond that.

In Haselhorst's ranking, the city made it back into the top ten, namely sixth place (40.5 percent degree of digitization), and Bad Nauheim came in eighth place, ahead of Berlin (36.3 percent).

Munich and Cologne took second and third place in the ranking.

In Hesse, Neu-Isenburg (83rd place), Wiesbaden (108th) and Bad Homburg are still doing quite well.

The Haselhorst authors derive the hundred percent, so to speak the ideal image of the Smart City, from the “Smart City Charter” adopted in 2017, which also emphasizes that the use of new, digital technologies should always serve the goal of a city worth living in in the long term .

Darmstadt has fallen behind

Achim Berg, Managing Director of Bitkom, also emphasized that more digitization could make cities better on Tuesday when presenting his study.

Bitkom calls it the Smart City Index and only uses the 81 German cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants.

Especially in the current energy crisis, smart technologies offer municipalities great opportunities to use resources more sensibly, says Berg.

It needs “a dedicated town hall,” he continued.

One in which everyone feels committed to the topic up to the top.

In Frankfurt's Römer, as is well known, other things are currently moving the mayor.

And the head of the digital department, Eileen O'Sullivan (Volt), recently admitted in an interview with the FAZ that not all departments in Frankfurt are pulling in the same direction when it comes to digitization.

But it wouldn't work without it: "We are only able to act if the entire magistrate participates."

It seems to work better in Darmstadt, the Bitkom authors see the city ahead and awarded 75 out of 100 possible points.

However, the digital city has fallen from fifth to tenth place since last year.

Here, too, Hamburg and Munich proved to be the smart leaders with almost the same number of points, followed by Dresden, Cologne and Stuttgart.

The state capital of Mainz held its ground in 30th place, followed by Wiesbaden ten places behind.