Smart Cities Evaluation – A Survey of Performance and Sustainability Indicators

Nowadays, the cities continuously attract new residents and become preferable places to live. They provide better quality services in transportation, healthcare and education compared to villages. The cultural diversity and tourist attractiveness of the cities is also greater than the rural areas. At the same time, due to urbanization the cities meet a lot of challenges affecting both their economic performance and well-being. Some of them, like higher prices of services and goods might be directly measured, and others, such as pollution, traffic congestion and limited parking spaces, are difficult to quantify in term of cost. This paper examines the research efforts towards establishing a framework of indicators to monitor and assess the performance and sustainability of smart cities. It presents an analysis of the currently available smart city indicators (SCIs) by classifying them in six thematic areas, namely Smart Nature, Smart Living, Smart Mobility, Smart Governance, Smart People and Smart Economy.