Chapter 7 - Assessment tools and indicators for smart city assessment

Abstract

Assessment tools are increasingly applied to evaluate the performance of smart cities at different levels. This chapter provides an overview of existing smart city assessment tools. Different aspects of smart city assessment tools including scale of assessment, target groups, type of data, source of data, and geographical focus are studied. It is discussed that major approaches to assessment include benchmarking, baseline assessment, maturity assessment, assessment against peers, assessment against desirable targets, and scenario making. Currently, benchmarking is the most popular approach. However, depending on the specific needs of a development, other approaches may also be used to better inform decision making toward climate resilient cities. It is discussed that smart city should be evaluated at different levels and dimensions. There are six dimensions to cover all aspects of smart city including smart economy, smart people, smart mobility, smart governance, smart living, smart data. Different indicators related to these dimensions are provided that can inform planners and policy makers in their efforts. The chapter argues that smart city assessment tools should be able to facilitate transition toward climate resilience. In this regard, our analysis showed that existing assessment tools are relatively suitable for informing planning and policy making related to environmental and social dimensions. However, better integration of issues and indicators related to other dimensions such as infrastructure is needed. We hope these will be further investigated in the future research.