Defining sustainable action plans in metropolitan cities using the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process group decision analysis

The formulation and selection of planning strategies promoting the smart development of metropolitan cities, aggregates of functional urban areas with decentralized control and governance that extends beyond the core administrative/political city is a far from straightforward process. It suffers from the problems inherent in the intelligent urban development and sustainable socio-economic growth of cities as well as from new issues deriving from the spatial and structural characteristics of the metropolitan city. This paper applies the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process multi-criteria decision-making technique to a smart metropolitan city context. The aim is selecting the optimal strategy for the smart development of metropolitan cities in a set of candidate action plans, while using multiple performance indicators, and taking into account that several decision makers may be involved in the planning decisions. The developed approach adopts the indicators defined by the SDEWES (Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems) Index framework, which focus on the key aspects of smartness related to energy, water, and environment. The approach is then applied to the real case of Bari (Italy), with the aim of selecting the optimal mix of flagship projects (within a list of flagship projects implementable in each strategic areas of the metropolitan city of Bari) that allows gaining this objective (sustainability) with a given amount of available resources. The findings highlight that the proposed method is suitable for selecting smart development action plans, allowing taking into account multiple perspectives in the comparison, while supporting group decision making and modeling the uncertainty that clearly affects the evaluation. Furthermore, the discussion of the results shows how such an approach may practically support local government’s decision makers in defining the optimal strategy to promote innovation of the organizational and management structure of a metropolitan city in a smart perspective.