A primer on city "smartness" measurement

Despite the unquestionable glamour of the topic, the measurement aspects of smartness are often mistreated in favour of the dissemination of best practices and projects at local level. Until now, nearly all the experiments to measure smartness at local level have produced rankings based on economic, social, environmental and technological infrastructures as outputs. As a matter of fact, outputs derived from city rankings are often highly heterogeneous regarding methodology and objectives. In order to compare the degree of smartness for different local contexts, it is necessary to find a convergence towards a shared measurement system that includes specific local aspects. This paper intends to carry out a theoretical and empirical experiment in order to verify whether some methodological innovations can produce improvements in the measurement of the Italian cities smartness compared to previous experiences