Urban Maturity Performance Measurement System Through Smart City Actions

The uncontrolled urbanization of Brazilian cities accentuates the imbalance between population demands and urban space planning. The integrated management of human and technological resources constitutes a fundamental governance strategy for the proposition of sustainable and effective responses to the challenges faced by cities. To generate references to public management, the objective of this research was to develop a management tool to verify the maturity level of Brazilian cities for smart city actions. A performance measurement system (PMS) organized smart city actions into 11 thematic areas, quantitatively measuring smart city actions in a down–top structure since the indicators and metrics are described in a standardized scale to obtain the general maturity index (GMI). The PMS was implemented in the city of Santa Maria/Brazil, where its GMI equal to 43.72% indicated a currently intermediate maturity level of smart city actions, mainly related to the low performance in the thematic areas of mobility, coexistence and reciprocity, and security and protection. To improve the current performance, five incremental actions were proposed, contemplating the key performance indicators “Public roads”, “Multipurpose lanes”, “Public accessibility”, “Accessibility signage”, and “Monitoring”, projecting a GMI equal to 49.75% and 55.78%, respectively, for an intermediate and an advanced maturity level scenario.