Defining an evaluation framework for digital cities implementation

Digital cities are nowadays an important topic, both for social and for economic studies. However, the main papers about digital cities regard the technical implementation of infrastructures and networks, or the shaping of urban spaces. Few attention is paid to the socio-economic value of digital cities and to the concrete benefits deriving from their implementation, together with costs and burdens linked with the governance and maintenance of technical and legal platforms. The goal of this paper is to define an evaluation framework to assess the quality and value of a digital city environment, including all the actors involved both in its building and in its regulation, in its use and in its economic exploitation. The evaluation framework should support the choices regarding the prioritization of programs and technical solutions, considering the socio-economic impacts of the digital city on all the project stakeholders. Moreover, the same framework should also be able to measure ex-post benefits really gained by all the stakeholder categories, and to support improvements of the platform and further implementations. The framework design is based on a theoretical investigation on international literature about this topic; its realization will involve companies, local governments, infrastructure providers, users.