Circular, Cultural and Creative City Index: a Comparison of Indicators-based Methods with a Machine-Learning Approach

Abstract

Culture, creativity and circularity are driving forces for the transition of cities towards sustainable development models. This contribution proposes a data-driven quantitative methodology to compute cultural performance indices of cities (C4 Index) and thus compare results derived by subjective and objective assessment methods within the case study of the Metropolitan City of Naples. After data processing with Machine-Learning (ML) algorithms, two methods for weighting the indicators were compared: principal component analysis (PCA) and geographically weighted linear combination (WLC) with budget allocation. The results highlight similar trends among higher performance in seaside cities and lower levels in the inner areas, although some divergences between rankings. The proposed methodology was addressed to fill the research gap in comparing results obtained with different aggregation methods, allowing a choice consistent with the decision-making environment.