Abstract With the gradual acceleration of urbanization, Smart City has become a new trend of global urban development. From the perspective of urban residents and based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, this paper establishes an evaluation index system of smart cities based on residents’ needs, which includes five levels and 21 indicators. An evaluation model of smart city is established by using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process method and questionnaire survey results to generate the index weight. Finally, an empirical study of 29 cities in China is carried out. The evaluation model is used to evaluate these cities and K-means clustering analysis is carried out. The results of evaluation are generally consistent with those of clustering. The different construction directions of these cities are obtained from the evaluation results of the five demand levels obtained by the model.