Smartness and Italian Cities. A Cluster Analysis

  • Flavio Boscacci DAStU - Politecnico di Milano
  • Ila Maltese DAStU - Politecnico di Milano
  • Ilaria Mariotti DAStU - Politecnico di Milano
Keywords: Smart city, Italian province capitals, Housing market, Cluster analysis

Abstract

Smart cities have been recently recognized as the most pleasing and attractive places to live in; due to this, both scholars and policy-makers pay close attention to this topic. Specifically, urban “smartness” has been identified by plenty of characteristics that can be grouped into six dimensions (Giffinger et al. 2007): smart Economy (competitiveness), smart People (social and human capital), smart Governance (participation), smart Mobility (both ICTs and transport), smart Environment (natural resources), and smart Living (quality of life). 

According to this analytical framework, in the present paper the relation between urban attractiveness and the “smart” characteristics has been investigated in the 103 Italian NUTS3 province capitals in the year 2011. To this aim, a descriptive statistics has been followed by a regression analysis (OLS), where the dependent variable measuring the urban attractiveness has been proxied by housing market prices. Besides, a Cluster Analysis (CA) has been developed in order to find differences and commonalities among the province capitals.

The OLS results indicate that living, people and economy are the key drivers for achieving a better urban attractiveness. Environment, instead, keeps on playing a minor role. Besides, the CA groups the province capitals a

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Author Biographies

Flavio Boscacci, DAStU - Politecnico di Milano

Full professor of Applied Economics at the Politecnico di Milano. He teaches Business and Urban Project Evaluation.

Ila Maltese, DAStU - Politecnico di Milano

Fellow researcher in Urban and Applied Economics. She teaches Economics and Environmental Economics at the Politecnico of Milan and at the Università Statale in Milan.

Ilaria Mariotti, DAStU - Politecnico di Milano

Assistant professor of Applied Economics at the Politecnico di Milano. She teaches Urban and Regional Economics.

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Published
2014-05-15
How to Cite
BoscacciF., MalteseI., & MariottiI. (2014). Smartness and Italian Cities. A Cluster Analysis. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment. https://doi.org/10.6092/1970-9870/2512