Planning smart cities. Comparison of two quantitative multicriteria methods applied to real case studies

Today, cities are facing many challenges such as pollution, resource consumption, gas emissions and social inequality. Many future city views have been developed to solve these issues such as the Smart City model. In literature several methods have been proposed to plan a Smart city, but, at the best of the authors’ knowledge, only a few of them have been really applied to the urban context. Most of them are indeed theoretical and qualitative approaches, providing scenarios that have not been applied to real cities/districts. Moreover, a comparison among the results of different quantitative planning models applied to real case studies is still missing. In this framework, the aim of the paper is to propose a new quantitative method based on a previous qualitative model developed by the same authors. The feasibility and validity of the method will be tested through the comparison with an existing AHP model and the application of both approaches on two real case studies, characterized by different territorial levels. Results of the analysis show that both methods are consistent, reliable and do provide similar results despite the differences in the application process.