Smart cities: a policy tool for city efficiency?

The level of interest in smart cities has been growing during these last years. The academic literature (Hollands, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) has identified a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, business-friendly, environmental sustainability, social innovation, information and knowledge process, and human and social capital. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way as well as to citizens’ wellbeing through the use of appropriate technologies. Instead, from a “political perspective” smartness is mainly related to the ability of using ICT as instrument to strengthen economic growth. A research by Giffinger et al. (2007) to support European policy has defined the concept of smart city on the basis of several intangible indicators (such as a smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance) and has become a benchmark for European policy makers (European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, 2014). Following this influential research, the aim of our paper is to verify how much that smartness definition can influence the efficiency and indirectly the growth of the cities. Using the concept of output maximising, we built a stochastic frontier function in terms of urban productivity and/or urban efficiency by assessing the economic distance that separates cities from that frontier. Our conclusions highlight that not all the six indicators defined in the Giffinger et al. (2007)’ analysis contribute to strength the city efficiency.