Being an Efficient Smart City in Croatia: The View of Citizens

Nowadays, many discussions revolve around the topic of smart, technology-based cities. Local self-governments need to consider smart city factors if they want to provide quality services to their citizens and implement policies effectively. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on smart cities, but look at them from a different perspective - from the citizens' point of view. In each of the 25 largest cities in Croatia, we asked citizens to rate their satisfaction with the dimensions of smart cities and rank them in terms of importance. We used the results in the AHP analysis to rank the cities according to their smart city performance from the citizens' perspective. In addition, we use DEA, to study the efficiency of the use of the city budget for projects related to the development of a smart city. While we present the high-ranking Croatian cities as examples of good practices, we also emphasize the efficient use of budgets by the not so high-ranking cities and their realization of investment needs in this area. Our study contributes to the understanding of smart cities from the citizens' perspective and expands the knowledge base on the development of smart cities in Croatia.