The Urban Media Lab Milan has been ranked 1st Italian smart city for the fifth consecutive year by the ICity Rate 2018 report, and 2nd on Ernst & Young's Italian smart city index 2016, following closely behind Bologna.

But what does it mean exactly for a city to be "smart"? Although many attempts have been made at defining the main attributes of a smart city, there is currently no consensual academic definition. Bianca Wylie considers that behind the smokescreen of the marketing language, it is simply a term "usually used to describe the use of technology and data in cities" [1]. As such, the smart city is often criticized as a concept which only focuses on technology to depoliticize urban phenomena, ignore issues of social justice, and favour new incursions of large tech firms in the shaping of urban infrastructures. Other authors try to define the smart city in broader terms that go beyond the sole focus on technology. Gillinger et al. (2007[2]) for instance, ranked 70 European cities on six dimensions: smart economy (competitiveness), smart people (human and social capital), smart governance (participation), smart mobility (transport and ICTs), smart environment (natural resources), and smart living (quality of life).