From Global Urban Indicators to Policy Priorities: Development and Application of the Guest City Index

The growing pursuit of urban sustainability, liveability, and competitiveness has increased the need for comprehensive tools capable of assessing urban performance. However, existing city indices employ diverse conceptual frameworks, indicator sets, and evaluation methods, and often provide limited support for policy prioritization and resource allocation. This study develops the Guest City Index as a composite framework for measuring urban performance and identifying policy priorities. The index was constructed through a multi-stage process combining Bibliometric Analysis (BA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and systematic indicator screening applied to data derived from 37 international city indices. The final framework consists of 16 thematic dimensions and 64 indicators. The proposed index was empirically applied to five metropolitan cities in Türkiye for the period 2022–2024, enabling the comparison of overall and thematic urban performance. In addition, the study introduces a decision-support model incorporating linear optimization, scenario analysis, and sensitivity analysis to compare alternative policy-priority configurations and examine their model-based performance implications. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides a transparent analytical tool for comparing urban performance and alternative policy-priority configurations, thereby supporting context-sensitive urban decision-making.