Smart cities in perspective – a comparative European study by means of self-organizing maps

Abstract

Cities form the heart of a dynamic society. In an open space-economy cities have to mobilize all of their resources to remain attractive and competitive. Smart cities depend on creative and knowledge resources to maximize their innovation potential. This study offers a comparative analysis of nine European smart cities on the basis of an extensive database covering two time periods. After conducting a principal component analysis, a new approach, based on a self-organizing map analysis, is adopted to position the various cities under consideration according to their selected “smartness” performance indicators.

Keywords:

• self-organizing maps
• smart cities
• creative cities
• cities' performance
• urbanization
• location
• concentration
• proximity externalities
• geographic knowledge spillovers

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank Chiara del Bo and Andrea Caragliu for their assistance in the data collection.

Notes

1. Published by the Centre of Regional Science, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, October 2007 (www.smart-cities.eu).

2. For more details on the latter network, we refer to www.smartcities.info

3. This section briefly explains the general idea and functioning of the basic SOM algorithm. For a complete and rigorous treatment of the SOM methods, the reader is referred to Kohonen (2001).

4. For a bibliography of papers using the SOM algorithm, see Oja et al. (2003).