Smart cities in Europe

Urban performance depends nowadays not only on the endowment of hard infrastructure, but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of communication and social infrastructure. The concept of “smart city” has been devised to encompass modern urban production factors into a common framework and in particular to interpret the wide diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the last twenty years. The present paper aims at shedding light on the elusive definition of the concept of smart cities. We provide a narrower and clearer definition of this idea and present consistent evidence on the geography of smart cities in the EU27. Our statistical and graphical analysis exploit in depth, for the first time to our knowledge, the most recent version of the Urban Audit dataset. We show that the presence of a creative class, the quality of and attention to the urban environment, the level of education, multimodal accessibility and the use of ICTs for the Public Administration are all positively correlated with urban wealth. This defines a feasible agenda for European smart cities, in order to achieve sustainable development and a better urban landscape.