Lessons in urban monitoring taken from sustainable and livable cities to better address the Smart Cities initiative

In this paper we put forward two ideas for monitoring the Smart Cities initiative in a better way. In developing the first idea, we study past and on-going initiatives in the field of sustainable cities and livable cities and their respective monitoring indicators to demonstrate that not only is a set of indicators needed for efficient monitoring, but also a final synthetic or aggregative index to visualize the initiative's achievements. Specifically, we propose the construction of synthetic indices using principal component analysis (PCA). The second idea attempts to anticipate the changes needed, especially with regard to data collection, to be introduced in current monitoring practices to assess a city's "smartness" accurately. We propose the use of real-time data instead of historical statistics as the basic information with which to construct a set of indicators to explain the initiative. A final index summarizing Smart Cities' real-time set of indicators is suggested in the conclusion. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.