Global trends towards urbanisation are associated with wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for cities. Smart technologies create new opportunities for a range of smart city development and regeneration programmes designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges concentrated in cities. Whilst smart city programmes have received much publicity, there has been much less discussion about the evaluation and measurement of smart city programme outcomes. Existing evaluation approaches have been criticised as non-standard and inadequate, focusing more on implementation processes and investment metrics than on city outcomes and the impacts of smart city programmes. Addressing this, the SmartDframe project aimed to examine city approaches to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes and reporting of their impacts on city outcomes. A number of ‘smarter’ UK cities were invited to participate, with agreement by city authorities from Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough to be interviewed about their smart city work. The findings provide a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about existing and best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programmes
