SMART GOVERNANCE. LA DIMENSIONE DELLA COMPETITIVITÁ

n the last decade, several studies have developed and updated different rankings of countries, regions and cities in order to describe and measure their performance in a varied urban aspects, including economic and social ones. In particular, as the number of composite indexes developed worldwide is growing, in the last years, one of the topics that has mostly attracted the interest of academia, and even beyond, is that of the Smart City. In this context, this chapter aims at the development of a composite indicator to measure and compare the inclination to smartness of twelve Italian metropolitan cities, where several initiatives have been carried out to improve their level of smartness. The index has been constructed based on six main dimensions – people, economy, environment, mobility, governance and living – which have been considered the pillars of urban intelligence. Furthermore, a multivariate statistical analysis has been applied to the set of data in order to identify the principal factors that structure urban smartness within the Italian context. The comparison amongst these cities based on the index and the mutivariate analysis has provided interesting findings about the strenghts and weaknesses of the initiatives developed by each city, as well as about the large gap between the most virtuous realities, all located in the central-northern part of the country, and the laggards. These results represent a useful support in order to understand if and how these metropolitan areas are ready to carry out the tasks the n.56/2014 Law has assigned them