Why are Rankings of 'Smart Cities' Lacking?An Analysis of Two Decades of e-Government Benchmarking

摘要

This paper aims to discuss current approaches to smart city rankings following the main thesis that two decades of e-government benchmarking should be used as a source of inspiration on how to evaluate smart government. We use critical analysis of selected smart-city and two major e-govemment rankings for this purpose. As our findings show, smart city rankings are lacking for several reasons: there is no consensus on what a smart city is, there are no defined development stages, smart city rankings tend to use quantity indicators or concentrate on the supply-side, and they often suffer from dimension or company biases and often lack methodological transparency.