Exploring aspects of environmental, mobility and economical smartness in European cities: a factor analysis approach.

The interest in smart cities has been growing steadily in recent years with a specific focus on the role of physical capital and the availability and quality of human capital. At present, there are a significant number of ranking evaluations and correlation analyses between different aspects of smartness and economic aspects. However, there are few examples of analyses, which take into account, at the same time, multiple socio-demographic variables, economic variables and smart city characteristics. None of these explored in deep commonalities between cities with similar performance. In our study, we took into account 63 European cities from: Germany, Spain and Poland. Thanks to the Urban Audit dataset, we were able to collect different types of socio-demographic and economic variables and smart city characteristics. Our smartness characteristics refer to environment, mobility and ICT economy. A factor analysis allowed us to combine 9 variables in 3 factors: the first factor groups the socio-demographic variables, the second factor groups the economic variables, and the third factor groups the variables of the smart city characteristics. Our results suggest that there is no correlation between city size and smart city characteristics and no correlation between economic wealth and smart city characteristics considering all the 63 cities. Our investigation has highlighted shared features between top-ranking cities in terms of smartness in the three countries. More in detail, top-ranking German and Spanish cities are located in regions and areas where previous researches have underlined an open and dynamic economic environment based on interrelations between firms and institutions. Top-ranking Polish cities in terms of smartness are those that mostly experienced radical changes on local policy dynamics and the advent of new business structures. We also interpreted our results with data available from the Covenant of Mayors. The results presented in this study could be used to better delineate a strategic agenda for European cities, thus allowing decision makers to address wider challenges for smarter urban development.