Mapping the Performance of Smart Cities in the European Union

Smart city defines an urban area which incorporates the needed communication and information technologies to boost the performance and quality of urban services, such as transportation, utilities, and energy to decrease resource consumption, waste, and total costs and to increase also the quality of life for its citizens by using intelligent technologies. A circular city incorporates the assumptions of the circular economy in all its functional areas, establishing a renewable and accessible urban system, abundant in design. These cities desire to defeat the concept of waste, carry them active at their biggest value at any time, and are activated by technology. A circular city aims to generate accomplishment, increase habitability, and enhance the flexibility of the city and its people, seeking to decouple the value creation from the consumption of finite resources. Cities will play a considerable role in a worldwide transition to a circular economy. A lot of factors are merely position cities to drive the worldwide transition to the circular economy. They will have many benefits: proximity of materials and people in the urban space, efficient markets, the ability of governments to model urban planning and policy, and the digital revolution. In this context, the aim of the chapter is to determine the main determinants of smart cities and also to measure the smart city performance building a composite index for smart cities of 28 European countries and Schengen area using principal component analysis combined with cluster analysis based on 22 variables at the level of 2018. The empirical results revealed that green spaces, finding a job, schools, citizens’ safety, and the integration of expats are the main determinants of European smart cities. The classification of cities, according to these components, revealed that Zurich and Oslo are the smartest cities in Europe, while Athens and Rome were situated on the opposite side. Switzerland and Norway are the countries with the best overall performance in terms of smart city performance, all cities of these two countries belonging to the first category. In addition, most cities from the Nordic countries, along with some from Austria and Germany, got the best performance. On the opposite side, there are the cities of Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and Cyprus. An interesting finding is the fact that Italy as a whole performs poorly; four of the cities from the last positions in the ranking are Italian cities, namely, Rome, Venice, Genoa, and Palermo. In the case of Romanian cities, the results were divided. On the one hand, there is Bucharest and Craiova, with the modest performance, and on the other hand, there is Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, and Oradea with an acceptable level of performance and Iași, Constanța and Brașov registering average values. The Romanian leader in terms of smart city performance is considered to be Cluj-Napoca. Cluj has reached Western standards in terms of smart cities.