Abstract
Becoming a smart city is one of the top priorities in the urban agenda of many European cities. Among the various strategies in the transition path, local governments seek to bring innovation to their cities by encouraging multinational enterprises to deploy their green energy services and products in their municipalities. Knowing how to attract these enterprises implies that political leaders understand the multi-criteria decision problem that the energy sector enterprises face when deciding whether to expand to one city or another. To this end, the purpose of this study is to design a new manageable and controllable framework oriented to European cities’ public managers, based on the assessment of criteria and sub-criteria governing the strategic location decision made by these enterprises. A decision support framework is developed based on the AHP technique combined with an extended version of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic TOPSIS method. The main results indicate the higher relative importance of government policies, such as degree of transparency or bureaucracy level, as compared to market conditions or economic aspects of the city’s host country. These results can be great assets to current European leaders, they show the feasibility of the method and open up the possibility to replicate the proposed framework to other sectors or geographical areas.
Highlights
Urban systems are dynamic spaces of cohabitation and development of human and industrial activities that have experienced a great evolution during the last decades
World Commission on Environment and Development [10] stated that multinational companies, within the private sector, have the power to contribute to sustainable development and to bring far-reaching changes and improvements needed in the face of climate change and unsustainable practices
Considering how important the energy sector is for the sustainable development, this study focuses on understanding which variables are most significant for the green energy European multinational enterprises, when making the choice for new locations to offer their services
Summary
Urban systems are dynamic spaces of cohabitation and development of human and industrial activities that have experienced a great evolution during the last decades. The consolidation of human well-being and the generation of opportunities for its inhabitants in many different fields have encouraged cities’ growth, so much so that since 2007, according to United Nations [1], more than half the world’s population is living in urban areas, consuming over 60% of total resource and generating around 70% of global carbon emissions It means that cities are one of the most significant contributors to climate change [2], but it makes cities one of the key actors having an influence and the ability to fight for the sustainable development [3,4], by implementing low carbon development plans [5,6]. World Commission on Environment and Development [10] stated that multinational companies, within the private sector, have the power to contribute to sustainable development and to bring far-reaching changes and improvements needed in the face of climate change and unsustainable practices
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