Smart Cities and Resident Well-Being: Using the BTOPSIS Method to Assess Citizen Life Satisfaction in European Cities

With rapid urbanization, maintaining a high quality of life (QoL) for city residents has become a critical challenge for policy-makers and urban planners. Smart cities, leveraging advanced technologies and data analytics, present a promising pathway to enhance urban services and promote sustainability. This paper introduces an innovative adaptation of the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method, integrating a Belief Structure (BTOPSIS) to improve the evaluation and interpretation of survey data. Our approach effectively addresses the distribution of responses across categories and the uncertainty often present in such data, including missing or ambiguous answers. Additionally, we perform a sensitivity analysis to assess the stability of the BTOPSIS rankings under varying utility function parameters, further validating the robustness of our method. We apply this framework to the 2023 ‘Quality of Life in European Cities’ survey, analyzing diverse urban factors such as public transport, healthcare, cultural facilities, green spaces, education, air quality, noise levels, and cleanliness. Additionally, our study offers a comparative analysis of BTOPSIS against other multi-criteria methods used for evaluation data from this report, showcasing its strengths and limitations in addressing the dataset’s complexity. Our findings reveal significant variations in residents’ perceived QoL across European cities, both between cities and within countries. Zurich and Groningen rank highest in satisfaction, while Tirana, Skopje, and Palermo are ranked lowest. Notably, residents of cities with populations under 500,000 report higher satisfaction levels than those in larger cities, and satisfaction levels are generally higher in EU and EFTA cities compared to those in the Western Balkans, with the highest satisfaction observed in northern and western Member States. To aid urban planners and policy-makers, we propose a ranking tool using the BTOPSIS method, capturing nuanced resident perceptions of living conditions across cities. These insights provide valuable guidance for strategic urban development and advancing the smart city agenda across Europe.