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This report has been written under the framework of SmartDframe project, targeting on the investigation of approaches regarding the evaluation of smart city projects and programs. As it is stated on the beginning of this report, although smart city programs have been placed at the center of attention, less discussion has been made about their evaluation and the measurement of their outcomes.
The report provides a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programs.
The important role of the evaluation process emerges from a series of issues that are pointed out in this report. According to it, these issues include its crucial role to inform city policy formation, planning, and decision-making; to demonstrate the replicability and scalability of projects to city scale; to enable cities to evaluate their progress against city performance indicators and metrics; to work with industry on the business/value case for investment; to support citizen engagement with the smart city work and enable citizens, including residents and local business and other organizations to benefit from new opportunities; and, to support benchmarking studies and inter-city comparisons for city learning from best practice.
The selected cities that took part in this project included Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough. For each one of these cities the adopted smart city strategy and action was described, followed by the approach to evaluation process. Moreover, the effectiveness of this evaluation process was also highlighted. Reporting on city outcomes and their contribution to decision-making was the final part of this investigation process, as long as possible challenges and improvements that might arise.
Download the full report here.