ABSTRACT
Since 2007, a team at TU Wien, a university in Vienna, Austria, has worked on a comprehensive tool for assessing smart cities. The evaluation system provides an integrative approach to profiling and benchmarking European medium-sized cities and is regarded as an effective learning instrument on urban innovations in the specific field of urban development. Following adaptations and updates, four versions of the smart city model have been released, whereby the three early versions focus on medium-sized cities and the fourth version on larger cities in Europe. The chapter describes the role of city rankings in strategic policy advice and provides some indications of why benchmarking and a place-based approach are important. It explains the various categories of smart urban development and their relationship to sustainability using the European smart cities approach. Finally, the discourse will address the single characteristics of the six key fields considered (economy, people, governance, mobility, living, environment) and the indicators used for empirical evidence.
