Listen to the episode:

You can find the shownotes through this link.

---

Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Functionality between the size and indicators of smart cities: A research challenge with policy implications from 2018 by Kamila Borsekova, Samuel Koróny, Anna Vaňová, and Katarína Vitálišová, published in the Cities journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see an investigation into the connection between smart cities and city sizes. This article identifies the most significant indicators of smart cities that can divide smart cities into size categories and future policy challenges.

The concept of smart cities is currently a very popular and fashionable approach to urban development. Nowadays, almost all cities claim to be more or less smart with a focus on ICT even though research also highlights human, social and relational capital and environmental interests for urban growth. Smart city concepts are also seen as promising responses the challenge of urban sustainability. However, transforming a city into a smart city requires substantial effort from its political representatives, administrators, inhabitants, entrepreneurs as well as from its various communities.

The size of a city is considered as an important driver of economic development. Empirical evidence from the States and the UK shows that large cities lead to greater productivity and economic growth through the generation of agglomeration economies which allow for a more productive use of available resources. On the other hand, large cities with high level of urbanisation can have negative effects in social, environmental and economic terms. Large cities need to be diverse and with a high concentration of the creative classes. In contrast, small and medium sized cities tend to be thought of places with a healthier environment and a higher ecological awareness. From research, it is not clear whether smartness is affected by the size of a city. Therefore, this paper focuses on identifying indicators that allow to correctly predict the size and the character of European smart cities.

The smart city concept has undergone many changes since its conception, with various ways of understanding smartness in urban developments. Smartness can be design of policy and its implementation. Increasing smartness can revitalise local economies to meet the challenge of a constantly evolving local-global pendulum. Smart cities can be the urban areas where the local expertise of people, technology, entrepreneurship and society are utilised. A smart city can be a well-performing city built on the smart combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent and aware citizens. The word smart includes various features like technological and interconnected, but also sustainable, comfortable, attractive and safe, and many more. The availability and quality of ICT infrastructure is not the only definition of a smart or intelligent city, and other definitions stress the role of human capital and education in urban development.

Besides a fairly wide-range debate on the crucial components of smart cities, there is almost no debate in scientific literature discussing the relation between the size of the city and crucial components of urban development. Since the beginning of the 21^st century, megacities and metropolitan regions get particular attention among politicians, city planners and managers. Research results showed the importance of metropolitan areas from the productivity point of view, but also revealed serious concerns related with environmental sustainability, pollution, traffic problems or quality of housing. Several other studies uncovered that small and medium sized cities play a more significant role in the economy than policy-makers acknowledge. Statistics show that the city size matters a great deal in GDP generation of a city in a country.

In Europe, 67% of urban inhabitant live in medium-sized cities, meaning smaller than 500.000 inhabitants, while just 9.6% are located in cities having more than five million people. Europe is characterised by a more polycentric and less concentrated urban structure compared to the States, India or China. Thus, there is a strong indication that population size of cities matters, especially in EU member states concerning its urban economy and smart city development. However, areas in the shadow of metropolitan regions tend to be neglected in the current globalisation and regional competition. It is crucial to pay attention on a city size not only from the scientific point of view but also from planning and decision-making perspectives.

The scientific objective of this paper was to find a simple understandable model linking the categorical variable city size to a group of smart city indicators. For this, the researchers used statistical parameters and Wilcoxon test in order to summarize and sort out smart city indicators for both size groups. Then, they used standard multivariate classification, namely discriminant analysis and logistic regression in order to find classification of size city groups by suitable multivariate statistical model. They chose a decision tree as a main methodological instrument. The method builds decision trees for predicting dependent categorial variable, in this case the size of a city, by continuous or categorical independent variables, such as the smart city indicators. The decision tree is simple to understand, interpret and at the same time able to handle both numerical and categorical data from many variables. The researches used data sets containing 158 cities with 27 smart city indicators. They used the European Smart Cities Ranking as their base for establishing the indicators, which we discussed in the first ever episode.

The statistical results show that both ecological awareness and local accessibility are on average higher in larger cities than in medium cities. The researchers assumed that performance of other smart city indicators might differ in the smart cities of different size, which can be an important issue for policy-makers and challenge for further research. Efficient and well-oriented focus on enhancement of particular smart city indicators might have positive impact on the capacity of cities of different size to exploit their growth factors. Six significant indicators – ecological awareness, innovative spirit, touristic attractiveness, ethnic plurality, air quality, and public and social services – were able to distinguish between medium-sized and larger European cities.

The decision tree instrument revealed some additional information. On average, larger cities have more pronounced ecological awareness, maybe due to the fact that policy-makers, urban planners and finally also citizens and communities pay a lot of attention to the quality of the environment. Larger cities usually have to deal with more environmental problems than medium-sized cities caused by higher population density. Additionally, larger cities benefit more from better sustainable resources management also possibly increasing ecological awareness. On the other hand, medium-sized cities are more open-minded than larger cities, while the latter ones have greater ethnic plurality. This can be because larger cities are more attractive to different ethnicities but their integration can be challenging, and there is more anonymity in larger cities, without a real sense of community. Therefore, urban open-mindedness should be treated as a fragile plant.

The larger cities have poorer quality of housing, possibly due to the density and negative consequences of urban life, such as traffic jams, higher crime rate, etc. Interestingly, medium-sized cities have greater innovative spirit than larger ones, maybe caused by the simple preference of innovators and representatives of creative class not to live rush and busy life of a big city. In the 21^st century, medium-sized or even small cities can offer comparable living and working conditions at a lower cost and in a more comfortable environment. The researchers’ model to predict the city sizes can be reliably based on five indicators: ecological awareness, open-mindedness, housing quality, innovative spirit and ethnic plurality. Based on these results, urban planners, policy-makers and representatives responsible for urban development may exploit these results in term of planning their priorities formulating urban development goals and partial development objectives.

A great deal of studies and practices address smart city issues at the level of large cities or metropolitan areas. This is a logical reason because larger cities have more money to invest in new technologies. Bigger cities are more interesting from a business perspective in terms of the amount of investment and their returns. Of course, market size is more interesting as well. On the other hand, if we consider the importance of small and medium-sized cities, we mas assume that it is crucial to pay more attention to this size category in new and modern concepts of urban development. Small and particularly medium-sized cities are constantly forced to seek for new impulses of development and efficient use of internal resources. Smart city concepts might be for them an efficient and suitable approach of urban development. There is no disadvantage in building smart cities for medium-sized cities in comparison with bigger ones. This is an important message for policy-makers, urban planners and representatives of urban development.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Smartness and smart city concepts are and can be useful for cities with every size.
2. Larger cities are more ecologically aware and ethnologically diverse, but medium-sized cities proved to be more open-minded, with greater innovative spirits and better housing quality.
3. Policy-makers, urban planners and representatives of urban developments could and should use urban smartness in their approaches regardless of the city’s size.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What is the optimal size of the city for high quality smart city performance? This was a question for further investigation for the researchers as well.
2. What do you think is relation between smartness and your city?
3. What can be changed in your urban area within policies? What would you suggest to your urban policy-makers to become smarter?

---

---