Abstract
A key driver of Australia’s economic development is through promoting migration. A strong bottleneck to achieve the targets is a disproportional concentration of population in the metropolitan cities. To avoid congestion in these cities, emphasis is being given at the government level to promote the regional cities. With different city ranking systems, this study tries to identify linkage between the city ranking and people’s preference to live there. The proposed ranking system uses six components, namely, economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance. A comparison is done between the ranking systems by first assigning the same weightage to the six components and then assigning different weightages based on people’s preferences. This study considered 112 Australian cities, which were ranked by considering their performance based on the non-weighted and weighted parameters. Analytical Hierarchy Process is then used to assign the priorities/preferences of the components, factors, and indicators. The study also incorporates clustering technique to address the issue of missing data/information that is a typical problem with small cities where missing data is a common issue. The results of the comparison demonstrate that assigning weightage to ranking parameters makes the city ranking closer to the preference of people to live in a city. It is also recommended that the city ranking system and urban governance should have closer connection to each other. The lowest performing city ranking parameter should be given higher preferences in urban management and development plans.
Highlights
The world population is expected to double with 70% of the population living in cities by 2050 [1,2]
The maximum impact of preferences was observed for Adelaide, which scored among the top position for smart city ranking but secured 88th position among the preferred cities due to its poor performance in people and governance
The comparison of smart score and preference score shows that the difference of development and facilities between the metropolitan cities and regional cities is huge
Summary
The world population is expected to double with 70% of the population living in cities by 2050 [1,2]. Through the concept of developing smarter cities, the concern of urbanization can be addressed as the factors covered by smarty cities, ensures a sustainable urban development [3,4,5]. It can be concluded that population increase creates opportunities, yet challenges will be faced if not prepared for it correctly. Cities are not just a place to live in and work, they are “area of emotional attachment” as each city has their own “personalities”, “traditions”, and “attractions” [6]. It can be concluded that the concept of urban sustainability and smart city have been a potential solution to solve the problems concerning urbanization [7]
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