engleski

Evaluating smart city indicators: a tool for decision-making on the development strategy for Croatian large cities

The focus of this paper is to study large cities (defined as urban settlements with more than 35, 000 inhabitants, as well as county centres) in Croatia which is the crucial conductors of socio-economic development activities in the country. The research studies show that key decisions in the Croatian large cities have been mostly made without much of strategic consideration, being primarily reduced to setting ad hoc goals, activities and measures for their achievement (Perko Šeparović, 2006 ; Petak, 2009 ; Đulabić and Manojlović, 2011 ; Maleković, Puljiz and Polić, 2007 ; Jurlina Alibegović and Blažević, 2010 ; Jurlina Alibegović and Slijepčević, 2010). To overcome lack of strategic orientation, we identify the most important indicators for measuring competitiveness of the economy of Croatian large cities following Giffinger’s et al. (2007) methodology, which provide first step for cities strategic analysis. We use web scraping techniques to collect publicly available data to measure indicators that represent degree of economic development of Croatian large cities on several dimensions: innovation, entrepreneurship, economic image and trademarks, productivity, flexibility of labor market and international integration. Finally, we use 15 indicators to compare 25 Croatian large cities and to assess their comparative advantage in a wider international context. We provide explanation for every city rankings by analyzing the structure of our city-level data. All results are available through a web application designed by authors of this paper. We also estimate city development index using principal component analysis, which allow us to rank cities by degree of economic development. Therefore, we posit three main contributions of this paper. First, we use web scraping techniques to collect, clean and harmonize annual data that are not usually available from national statistical institutions. Second, we use estimated index of economic development for every city. Third, our analysis and comparison of competitiveness of Croatian large cities is made available through a web application (in English and Croatian) that should encourage key decision-makers to use available information and applying it in preparation and implementation of their Smart City forward looking strategies. This research paves the way to future investigation through which we will measure other five dimensions of Smart City concepts - smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living - aiming to emphasize the use of Smart City components for evidence-based monitoring of economic and social development of Croatian large cities.

smart city ; indicators ; large cities ; Croatia

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