Unveiling Urban Smartness: Empirical Evidence from Italian Cities

Rapid urbanization poses significant challenges, making the development of smart cities a strategic imperative to foster sustainable economic growth and enhance urban competitiveness. Measurement and evaluation tools are useful ways to set goals and monitor the cities’ progress toward smartness. There are few studies that examine the results achieved in the Italian context. This study introduces a robust multidi- mensional framework for evaluating the smartness of Italian cities, by providing the user with a step-by-step approach. The framework is composed of five stages: (i) a comprehensive literature review to develop a holistic understanding of smart cities and identify the criteria of the Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) process; (ii) the selection of indicators that serve as sub-criteria within the MCDM framework; (iii) weight assignment to each indicator by convening a panel of stakeholders and using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP); (iv) normalization, assessment, and aggregation of results, producing final scores to rank cities based on their smartness levels, using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method; (v) sensitivity analysis to confirm the stability and validity of the obtained results. Indicator data are collected from the 21 Italian regional capital cities. Application of the framework has returned meaningful results, highlighting signifi- cant disparities between the sampled cities. The model provides policy makers, urban planners and researchers with a comprehensive and scalable tool to measure urban intelligence, identifying strengths and potential areas for urban improvement. This study is a key contribution to the ongoing efforts to transform urban environments into smarter, more efficient spaces that improve the well-being of citizens.