Towards an Impartial Evaluation of Cities' Smartness: A Multivariate Statistical Approach

The issue of mapping the smartness of cities has attracted the attention of various stakeholders. One of the ways of quantifying city smartness and benchmarking cities based on the level of the achieved smartness is using composite indicators (CIs). However, the topic often cited as the slippery slope of CIs includes methodological issues when combining several indicators into one synthesized value. Aiming at providing a possible remedy to the subject, we employed the I-distance method to the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Cities of Opportunity Index. The results pointed out leader cities in terms of smartness, with the additional benefit of the study being encapsulated in much-needed inputs of essential components of the index. Consequently, decision-makers can foster the inputs of the study to raise the bar for a particular city.