smart city assessment: initiatives of mashhad smart city

The smart city, as the future of urban infrastructure, has a wide range of benefits, including better utilization of scarce resources and more welfare for citizens, and is a necessity for sustainable development. an increasing number of smart city projects have been implemented and many others are under development worldwide. there are many economic, environmental, and social challenges to develop a smart city. one of these challenges is the smartness assessment. key performance indicators (kpis) are important for measuring and comparing the grade of smart city maturity. the international telecommunication union (itu) has established the united for smart sustainable cities (u4ssc) to standardize and release a kpi set for measuring smart city development from various aspects. in this paper, we expand the standardized kpis and map it to contextualized kpis, which concerns the challenges and priorities for the specific case under study. by combining the standardized and contextual kpis, a comprehensive assessment model is created and used for smart city development. as a case study, we also briefly report the assessment of mashhad city smartness using the proposed method and the itu’s u4ssc verification process. we defined the smart tourism and smart water management as the contextualized kpis for mashhad and evaluated component of smart tourism and smart water management ecosystem.