Smart City Indicators: Can They Improve Governance in Croatian Large Cities?

The focus of this research is to implement the smart city methodology and develop smart city indicators for twenty-five large Croatian cities in order to develop a reference model for monitoring the success of Croatian large cities. Starting from the fact that only two Croatian cities have prepared a smart management strategy and that only thirty cities have developed smart projects in various sectors, the purpose of this research is to show the development of smart city indicators for the large cities through six dimensions of the smart city model: smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living. The smart city indicators are based on publicly accessible data and easily available sources. In addition, web scraping techniques were used to obtain data that are not available from public sources. After data collection, all variables were standardized, allowing the comparison of indicators of different measuring units. Twenty-nine indicators were identified and used to compare the twenty-five large Croatian cities and evaluate their comparative advantages. The main results of the research include an assessment of the smart urban development index and ranking of cities according to the degree of urban development. The smart city indicator is above average in only eleven large cities. Measures for promoting smart development have been proposed to city policy-makers. The research results have implications for increasing rationality in the use of local public resources.