Can Smart City Construction Enhance Citizens’ Perception of Safety? A Case Study of Nanjing, China

The construction of smart cities may bring positive and negative effects simultaneously on citizens’ perception of safety (CPS), while previous studies in the field of smart city construction paied significant attention to safety-related technologies but ignored CPS. Therefore, this work developed an indicator set consisting of five primary and eleven secondary indicators. A model integrating analytical network process and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation was used to evaluate CPS in smart cities. Nanjing, a pilot smart city in China, was adopted as the case to demonstrate the proposed evaluation methodology. The results showed that the CPS in Nanjing was at a positive level on the whole. The citizens held the highest CPS in medical treatment, while the CPS concerning information and food were weak. This paper would not only enrich the academic framework related to CPS, but also help the government formulate sustainable smart city construction strategies. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024.