Smart and sustainable benchmarking of cities and regions in Europe: The application of multicriteria assessment

This paper is focused on the multidimensional assessment of over 1300 cities and regions in Europe based on a powerful and policy-relevant set of 17 smart and sustainable performance indicators. Our approach, based on Shmelev and Shmeleva (2018), is driven by alternative policy priorities expressed in different sets of weights, emphasizing economic, social, smart or environmental aspects of urban performance. Using multiple-criteria decision analysis, the cities and regions were ranked, and well performing cities were selected for a detailed analysis of their policies. Among the best performing cities are Stockholm, Paris and London. The detailed rankings under environmental, economic, social and smart policy priorities are analyzed further. The article examines correlations between indicators including GRP, patents, PM₁₀ pollution, life expectancy and depicts the final smart and sustainable ranking in a GIS format. Our detailed assessment thus allows one to understand the impact of key policies implemented by the leading municipalities, and offers insights on the necessary steps that could be taken by cities and municipalities to improve their smart and sustainable performance. The set of tools developed by Environment Europe Foundation will support the process to generate recommendations for actionable steps and policies for cities around the world.