Towards smart city models: evaluation of methods and performance indexes for the smart urban contexts development

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, 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 universities campus/cities/districts. In this framework, the aim of this thesis is to integrate a previous qualitative smart method and transform it into a quantitative and ex-post one. The feasibility and validity of the method will be tested through the comparison with another existing model and the application of both approaches on two real case studies, characterized by different territorial levels. Finally, the flexibility of this new quantitative smart methodology is demonstrated throughout its application on another two urban contexts: highland villages and the Italian suburb. Results of the analysis show that this smart method is reliable and provide coherent results, becoming a useful instrument for designers and planners for the identification of the most performing Smart strategies.