Towards a Sustainability Index Calculator for Smart Cities

In this era of rapid urbanization and our endeavors to create more smart cities, it's crucial to keep track of how our society and neighborhood are getting impacted. It is important to make conscious decisions to keep harmony in sustainability. There are multiple frameworks to evaluate how sustainability is measured and to understand how sustainable a place is, be it a city or a region, and one such framework is the Circles of Sustainability. Though these frameworks offer good solutions, it is a challenge to collect relevant data to make the framework widely usable. This paper focuses on this specific issue by utilizing the methodology introduced in the framework and applying it practically to better understand how sustainable our cities and society are. We present a unique web-based application which utilizes publicly accessible data to compute sustainability scores and rank for every city and presents the results in an intelligent and easy to comprehend visual interface. The paper also discusses the technical difficulties associated with creating such an application, including data collection, data processing, data integration, and scoring algorithm. The paper concludes by discussing the needs for such practical solutions for promoting sustainable urban development.