Evaluation of Smart AND Sustainable City Development: What Indicators to Use, Why and When?

Sustainability and smartness are among the most common concepts that cities use to formulate their goals, and cities use indicators to keep track of progress towards those goals. The selection of indicators is difficult due to the abundance of frameworks designed for specific purposes but requiring expert knowledge to be correctly applied. Poor indicator selection can have serious negative consequences and lead to unintended incentives.

In this dissertation, I developed a taxonomy for indicator selection and comparison in smart and sustainable cities. I analysed 1500 indicators against this taxonomy, considering differences in conceptual focus, application sector and indicator type, and made recommendations on indicators' applicability to specific evaluation needs.

The results revealed clear differences between smart and sustainable city indicators. Smart city indicators predominantly focus on measuring short-term efficiency in technology deployment and fail to demonstrate the benefits of the technology. In contrast, sustainability indicators emphasise long-term impacts. Since technology implementation should not be an end goal but a means toward other goals, this dissertation recommends integrating smart and sustainable city indicators and adopting a new concept, "Smart sustainable cities". Cities are encouraged to combine different indicator types to keep track of short and long-term impacts.

Furthermore, I more deeply analysed two indicators (building energy efficiency and cities' carbon emissions), and also their selection and use are full of pitfalls. While the traditional, globally regulated building energy efficiency indicator (kWh/m2) properly measured the physical properties of buildings, it penalised environmentally beneficial measures that increased building use. Therefore, alternative functional units were developed to reward higher building occupancy and space efficiency.

The methods differentiating cities' carbon emission reporting include scope, boundaries and the definition of compensation allowed for carbon neutrality. Although cities typically focus on emissions caused within their boundaries, there is an increasing trend to cover emissions caused by consumption in cities but actualising elsewhere. City emissions are primarily affected by national measures, and cities need activity-based indicators to monitor the impact of local actions.

This dissertation's main contribution is the taxonomy for indicator selection. I recommend the following process for indicator selection: 1) City goals (balance between smart and sustainable indicators), 2) Purpose of evaluation (indicator type), 3) Scope of evaluation (sectoral coverage, functional unit, assessment method), 4) Availability of data and resources (selection of feasible indicators). Future studies are recommended to test this process's usefulness in different evaluation settings.