Europe’s 2020 vision of a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy supports smart city development and regeneration programmes, creating new data-driven opportunities for the evaluation of city performance. With the majority of world populations living in cities, it is important to investigate how smart data and analytics can support citizens’ quality of life, and social, environmental and economic indicators of city performance. Existing evaluation approaches are only beginning to grasp opportunities of integrating smart data across energy, transport, water, waste and ICT infrastructures, with city performance analytics to inform citizen participation, enterprise, governance, and transition towards citizen-centred sustainable cities.
With funding awarded from The Open University’s Smart Cities Open Challenge Competition, the SmartDframe project aims to develop new cross cutting ‘smart city evaluation frameworks’ to support city development programmes, and performance evaluation against relevant targets. Building on the capability being developed in MK:Smart and working closely with European city authorities, industry stakeholders, academics, and policy-makers, SmartDframe aims to trial smart city evaluation frameworks linked to city performance indicators that are holistic, data-driven, well-defined, impact-focused, and transferable across projects. Expert consultations with MK:Smart, and working across UK and EU smarter cities, will help refine evaluation methodology and foster city learning from best practice. Beneficiaries include city authorities, industry, academics, policy-makers and MK:Smart. The aim is to secure robust evidence to develop a rigorous evaluation methodology that informs city performance analytics, smart city developments and strategic planning.
Find out more SmartDframe
Research Team
Dr Sally Caird, Primary Investigator sally.caird@open.ac.uk
Professor Gerd Kortuem, Director
Dr Emma Dewberry, Advisor
Dr Lorraine Hudson, Research Consultant