Measuring Smart City Performance: a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis Approach

The concept of “smart city” is acknowledged by researchers and practitioners as a promising solution to address the challenges of urbanization and promote urban sustainability. Therefore, the assessment of smart cities has become a significant area of research. The current paper defines an evaluation framework by adopting 52 indicators classified under six smart pillars. Specifically, the PROMETHEE II method is used to rank 17 cities worldwide, with Singapore and Copenhagen achieving the highest performances. The sensitivity analysis for the two main parameters of the PROMETHEE II method validates the robustness of the results. In addition, the presented results (PROMETHEE II rankings) are compared to other well-known smart city evaluation frameworks in order to assess their validity. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature