European Cities Characterization as Basis towards the Replication of a Smart and Sustainable Urban Regeneration Model

This paper aims at describing the methodology implemented in the REMOURBAN (REgeneration MOdel for accelerating the smart URBAN transformation) project for the characterization of European middle size cities which allows identifying their potential characteristics and adverse conditions as starting point for addressing their sustainable urban transformation. The methodology comprises a selection of a suitable set of indicators for each application domain identified in the project (both technical - energy, mobility and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)- and non-technical -people, governance, finance), benchmarking of the data available at city level in the selected data sources and the utilization of statistical methods for clustering cities with homogenous characteristics. This study has been applied to 41 European cities from 18 countries and two complementary clustering methods were used in order to determine the clusters. In addition, for a better interpretation of the results and a more accurate classification of the cities, a detailed analysis was performed in each domain to conclude with a global analysis which groups all the indicators and domains. The paper describes the overall approach of the REMOURBAN Sustainable Urban Regeneration Model, to focus then on the methodology applied to characterise the European cities as basis for the replication of this model. After the identification and discussion of the main results obtained through this characterisation, the future works are presented.