Urban smartness and sustainability in Europe. An ex ante assessment of environmental, social and cultural domains

ABSTRACT

The aim of the paper is to define a set of smartness and sustainability indicators applicable to European cities and to assess their outcome in an ex ante perspective with regard to the implementation of Europe 2020 strategy. Following the DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, State, Impact, Response) model, we select a bundle of indicators for three relevant sustainability domains (environmental, social and cultural), which are proper to the smart city definition. Then we define groups of homogeneous cities for each domain by using a two-step cluster analysis. Results show the existence of heterogeneous groups of cities that are likely to become smart in the cultural domain, side by side with groups of more developed urban areas that have acquired a substantial advantage in the environmental and social dimensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart cities
• sustainability
• Europe 2020
• DPSIR model

Acknowledgements

We thank Anna Montini for the valuable help and support during the preparation of this manuscript. We are also grateful to the participants of the 53rd ERSA Congress (held in Palermo on 27–31 August 2013) and to Marco Modica and Claudia Ghisetti for useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hawkes argues that the pillars of sustainability are actually four, instead of the traditional three (environmental, social and economic): cultural vitality, social equity, environmental responsibility and economic viability.

2. This recognition follows the 6th Environment Action Programme (6th EAP), which called for the development of a Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment for contributing

to a better quality of life through an integrated approach concentrating on urban areas [and] to a high level of quality of life and social well-being for citizens by providing an environment where the level of pollution does not give rise to harmful effects on human health and the environment and by encouraging sustainable urban development. (European Parliament and European Council, 2003)

3. It is worth to notice that two-third of the smart cities mapped by the European Parliament (2014) address more than one characteristic and that the overall average of involved characteristics is 2.5.

4. Caragliu et al. (2011) provide six indicators of smartness: GDP per capita, number of employed persons in cultural and entertainment industry, multimodal accessibility, length of the network of public transport, e-government and human capital. Caragliu and Del Bo (2012) focus on three aspects: culture (proxied by the number of visitors to museums per resident), mobility (proxied by the length of public transportation) and e-government (proxied by the number of administrative forms available for download from official web site). Kourtit et al. (2012) analyse cities’ environmental sustainability using data on the employment structure of the urban workforce, on the degree of business and socio-cultural attractiveness and on the presence of public facilities and of sophisticated e-services.

5. Detailed results of PCA are available upon request.