City@Path: A Collaborative Smart City Planning and Assessment Tool

The lack of strategic planning has increased urban pressure and accumulated traffic in cities. Smart Cities are replacing the short-time perspective with a long-term approach. The objectives align with city strategic goals, and citizens play an essential role in the decision-making process. High-level guidelines have emerged over the years to guide smart Cities’ vision and implementation. However, the lack of a tool that combines top-down and bottom-up approaches to help local policymakers plan and assess cities is still notorious. Moreover, this paper provides a methodology that allows the definition of structural priorities and contextual preferences while comparing policymakers’ statements and citizens’ opinions. Furthermore, this paper designs an approach to fill the existing gap and give policymakers a framework to monitor and measure their performance based on standard Key Performance indicators and select relevant initiatives toward meeting the defined goals. This way, policymakers possess a tool that allows on the one hand, the standard comparison between cities and, on the other hand, the personalized comparison of their territory over time. Finally, a test case with the premise of improving city logistics is described to practically detail the guidelines of the proposed tool.