Urban Maturity Performance Measurement System Through Smart City Actions
, Alvaro Neuenfeldt Júnior 1, Sabine De Paris 2, Ronier Gutierrez 1 and Julio Siluk 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis article proposes a Performance Measurement System (PMS) to assess the maturity of Brazilian cities in implementing smart city initiatives. The system is organized across 11 thematic areas and 38 KPIs, culminating in a General Maturity Index (GMI). The PMS is applied to the city of Santa Maria, with comprehensive data collection and scenario projection. However, improvements are needed in terms of methodological transparency, scalability, validation, and language clarity to enhance the robustness and replicability of the research. Below are the detail suggestions:
- The PMS framework is well-structured, but the paper lacks sufficient detail about the normalization process and weight assignment for KPIs. For instance, how are the open upper-bound metrics (e.g., GDP per capita) normalized across cities of differing scales? Providing a supplemental table or annex with exact transformations and calculation steps would aid in reproducibility.
- While DEMATEL is mentioned as the basis for assigning weights to thematic areas, the rationale behind its selection over other MCDM (multi-criteria decision-making) methods is not clearly stated. A comparative justification or literature-based rationale should be added.
- The PMS tool is only applied to one city (Santa Maria). For generalizability and robustness, a comparative evaluation involving at least two or three cities of different sizes or contexts would be more convincing.
- I think that the maturity of a city could also be evaluated from the perspectives of infrastructure equity and green space equity, as these factors directly reflect a city's performance in terms of social equity, sustainability, and resident well-being, which you can refer to analysis part of in DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2023.113884.
- The results section is highly verbose and repetitive in tone. Grouping thematic areas with similar performance levels and summarizing their challenges in tables or figures could enhance clarity and reader engagement.
- The reliance on government documents and official statistics could be supplemented by citizen surveys or stakeholder interviews. This would ensure a more holistic view of the smart city maturity, including perception-based indicators of service quality and accessibility.
- While future research is briefly mentioned, a more critical reflection on the limitations of the PMS (e.g., data availability, regional biases, subjectivity in KPI evaluation) would strengthen academic rigor.
Author Response
We are very grateful for the contributions to the article. Attached is a document containing our responses to the suggestions provided.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe manuscript addresses an important applied challenge—developing a performance measurement system (PMS) for smart city actions in Brazilian urban environments. However, the literature review and theoretical contextualization are insufficiently developed for an international scientific journal. It is highly recommended to expand the theoretical framework by integrating perspectives from the metamodern shift in scientific thought. This could greatly enrich the paper's conceptual depth and situate it within a broader epistemological evolution in urban studies and sustainability research. Relevant works include: Matlovič & Matlovičová (2025): Highlighting the metamodern turn in human geography, particularly relevant for understanding urban governance as a relational, multi-scalar and dynamic process. Pipere & Martinsone (2023): Offering insights into metamodern sustainability education, emphasizing participatory, integrative, and reflexive approaches suitable for urban development strategies.
The application of DSR is not sufficiently elaborated. It remains unclear how the study follows the typical DSR cycles (relevance, rigor, design). The stages (problem identification, objectives of a solution, design & development, demonstration, evaluation, communication) are not explicitly described in the methodology section.
The discussion is too descriptive and lacks analytical depth. The authors primarily restate the measured values without critically engaging with why these results emerged, what structural factors influence them, or how they reflect broader urban challenges.
The arguments made about the effectiveness and utility of the proposed PMS are asserted rather than demonstrated.
The paper claims that the PMS is a useful tool for urban management, but provides no empirical validation, user feedback, or comparison with existing tools.
The incremental action scenarios (Scenario A & B) are useful but are presented as projections without methodological robustness (e.g., no cost-benefit analysis, feasibility studies, or stakeholder perspectives).
While numerical results are presented clearly, the interpretation is limited to descriptive comparisons (e.g., comparing Santa Maria’s figures to national averages). There is little analytical interpretation of why certain areas (e.g., mobility, coexistence) perform poorly.
The conclusion asserts that the PMS will support public management and sustainable urban development but does not provide empirical evidence (e.g., stakeholder feedback, comparative validation) to substantiate this claim.
References:
Matlovič, R., Matlovičová, K. 2025. The Metamodern Shift in Geographical Thought: Oscillatory Ontology and Epistemology, Post-disciplinary and Post-paradigmatic Perspectives. Folia Geographica, 67(1), 22-69.
Pipere, A., Martinsone, K. 2023. Shaping an Image of Science in the 21st Cen
tury: The Perspective of Metamodernism. Societies, 13, 254, 1-27. https://doi.
org/10.3390/soc13120254.
The manuscript suffers from frequent grammatical errors, including subject-verb disagreement, incorrect tense usage, missing articles, and awkward phrasing. Sentences are often too long and convoluted, making comprehension difficult. The paper therefore requires a professional English language edit before it is suitable for publication in an international scientific journal.
Author Response
We are very grateful for the contributions to the article. Attached is a document containing our responses to the suggestions provided.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis manuscript presents an elegant and operationally advanced framework to assess the maturity of urban governance through smart city actions in Brazilian municipalities. The development and empirical testing of a Performance Measurement System (PMS) in Santa Maria provides both conceptual innovation and pragmatic value. By structuring 38 indicators across 11 thematic domains and translating them into a General Maturity Index (GMI), the authors offer a replicable and policy-relevant tool with promising implications for comparative urban studies.
The article is theoretically grounded and adopts a Design Science Research approach, adding methodological rigour to its claims. The quantification of indicators, the normalization process, and the weight-based aggregation of thematic areas are conducted with great clarity and transparency. Moreover, the authors go further by simulating alternative scenarios based on incremental actions, demonstrating how the PMS can inform strategic planning and urban transformation.
That said, several important dimensions require strengthening to enhance both the analytical robustness and the sociological resonance of the article.
First, the urban case of Santa Maria would benefit from a more comprehensive sociological contextualization. As it stands, the city is introduced demographically and institutionally (see page 9, lines 246–255), yet its spatial dynamics, socio-economic fragmentation, governance history, and challenges such as informality or urban insecurity are not sufficiently examined. It is particularly important to include an account of recent urban planning decisions, conflictual development patterns, or the role of institutional actors. The work of Gabriel Feltran on crime and urban marginality, for example, would help integrate security as a socio-political issue, rather than solely a technical KPI (cf. page 12, line 377).
Second, while the article operates with precision in technical domains, it should better acknowledge recent critical debates on performance indicators as instruments of urban governance. The PMS here risks being read as a neutral evaluator of actions when in fact it participates in shaping what counts as legitimate governance. A brief engagement with the literature on regulation by incentives (e.g. Transnational Corporations Review, 2(2), 35–45) would be beneficial to articulate the performative dimension of indicators and their potential to reorder urban priorities.
Third, the article would be enriched by referencing international contributions that stress the heuristic and diagnostic power of performance indicators in urban historical research. The recent developments in hedonic price modelling—such as Barbot and Percoco (2019)—demonstrate how indicators can reveal embedded urban inequalities over time, even with limited data. This point would help counter the impression that indicator-based methods are only contemporary or technocratic.
Fourth, the paper would greatly benefit from acknowledging major advances in the study of urban expansion. The open-access “Atlas of Urban Expansion” (Angel et al. 2016) provides comparative tools that would allow authors to benchmark Santa Maria’s developmental trajectory in spatial terms and across time. This would also provide a more nuanced picture of the city’s growth dynamics and their governance implications.
Fifth, I strongly recommend integrating the work of Adenuga, Jack, and McCarry (2024) on behavioural drivers of land leasing. The integration of behavioural dimensions into urban maturity analysis would push the PMS beyond infrastructure metrics and towards a more holistic understanding of capacity and governance.
Finally, a deeper reflection is needed on how the PMS engages with issues of scale, temporality, and institutional embeddedness. The journal Nau Social has published in 2015 highly relevant contributions on the temporalities of social programming and their entanglement with local governance. https://periodicos.ufba.br/index.php/nausocial/issue/view/1815 These perspectives could help reframe some of the PMS projections (e.g., scenario A and B on page 14) not merely as technical improvements, but as decisions situated within complex local time horizons and institutional legacies.
It would greatly enhance the theoretical depth of the manuscript to engage with the burgeoning literature on how local elites selectively mobilize performance indicators such as the PMS to legitimize governance priorities, allocate symbolic capital, and negotiate institutional credibility. In particular, the work of Eduardo Marques offers empirically grounded insights into the relational and discretionary use of indicators within Brazilian urban governance, especially in settings marked by inequality and fragmented statehood. Further, the recent contributions by Shamus Khan and Bruno Cousin provide a valuable synthesis of how performance measures intersect with elite strategies, boundary-making, and modes of distinction within urban bureaucracies. By reflecting on this literature, the authors could nuance their presentation of the PMS—not only as a managerial tool for improvement, but also as an instrument embedded in political contestation and symbolic power.
To reinforce the sociopolitical contextualization of the case, the authors should consider the insightful work of Rosana Bullosa, who foregrounds how informality, weak statehood, and fragmented welfare infrastructures produce spatialized challenges to the very logic of performance-based governance. Bullosa’s research, particularly as published in Nau Social, problematizes the assumptions of institutional coherence and data reliability that underpin many smart governance initiatives. Integrating this line of thought would not undermine the value of the PMS proposed, but rather situate it more reflexively within the limits and frictions of real urban governance. This would lend analytical strength to the claim that maturity indicators are not merely technical diagnostics, but contested instruments operating within uneven territorial and institutional ecologies.
The conclusion should also insist more explicitly on how the framework contributes to current debates in comparative urbanism. Rather than invoking a global city model, which privileges macroeconomic connectivity, this article should align with recent contributions by Le Galès and Robinson (2024), emphasizing cities as contextually embedded governance spaces. The PMS contributes precisely to this grounded approach, and this should be presented as a strength.
To summarise, I find this article to be close to publication and a very promising contribution to sustainability-oriented urban studies. The structure, clarity, and replicability of the proposed system are to be commended. To reach its full potential, however, the article should incorporate stronger urban sociological contextualization, engage critically with the politics of indicators, and cite international literature that would expand its theoretical and comparative relevance.
Author Response
We are very grateful for the contributions to the article. Attached is a document containing our responses to the suggestions provided.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsGlad to see the authors have made efforts to address the comments and conduct necessary revisions to the manuscript, I have no more questions.
