City-Level Evaluation: Categories, Application Fields and Indicators for Advanced Planning Processes for Urban Transformation

Advanced urban-planning processes need methods and analysis tools to guide cities toward sustainable urban planning. This provides a realistic and specific urban strategy for each city. Leveraging current developments in various European Smart City projects (MAtchUP and MAKING-CITY), a city-level evaluation framework is proposed to support cities in their strategic-planning process. This process goes through the definition of a methodology to help municipalities in the progress of cities toward sustainability and smartness. Then, through the city-level evaluation, city needs and challenges are identified in order to help municipalities when prioritizing a city strategy. It also aims to evaluate the current status of the city to know to what extent the city is sustainable and smart, as well as to monitor the progress of the city to become sustainable and smart. This evaluation also provides information to the municipality and sets the methodology included in this paper to benchmark and compare multiple aspects within and between cities. This indicator-based methodology enables assessing specific characteristics of the city, diagnosing challenges or discovering patterns through reliable metrics, but also allows comparing various aspects of cities thanks to the normalization and weighting of indicators and the calculation of indexes. Based on the outcome of the literature review, the structure of the city-evaluation framework is performed under the concept of sustainable development, establishing a framework for comparison and evaluation. This framework works as a baseline for all cities in the context of defining their targets, needs, priority areas or action lines. The definition of this methodology has been a learning process based on the study of several methods of normalization, weighting and aggregation, such as the ones described by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) from the European Commission through the Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (COIN), to build the indexes by category and application field. The sensitivity analysis stage would be the last step to examine the suitability of the proposed evaluation methodology, from the selection of indicators to aggregation techniques. As a result, city’s needs, priorities and progress will be easily identified thanks to the both numerical and graphical results, from which to establish strategic objectives and priority actions in the planning processes for urban transformation.