A smart city represents a complex approach to the development of all systems, directions and spheres aimed at providing comfortable living conditions for citizens and qualitative management and reliable infrastructure for the city. The paper answers questions about how to estimate the ability of the implementation approach within a smart city, and how the stakeholders, such as energy policy makers, governance, utilities and municipalities, can choose a model thatwould promote maximum efficiency by the implementation in the energy sector of the city. The paper has three main sections, the first of which provides a literature review with a classification of different approaches to the implementation of a smart city depending on the scope and tasks. The main emphasis is placed on the analysis of the energy component of smart city decisions. The second section proposes a series of criteria for evaluating the existing approaches to a smart city. The ability to flexibly react to the changes in consumption, unpredicted situations, changes in the needs, sustainability in generation and the supply of electricity and heat, as well as considering alterations in the legislative base, has been taken into account when analysing smart city infrastructure. Finally, the third section presents a decision-making scheme related to choosing the development methodology in a smart city that enables accounting of multifaceted nature of urban environment development, as well as describing a scheme of the block-integrated approach to the methodology of smart city development. In the authors’ opinion, it can have the largest potential for flexible, sustainable and stable development and will produce the greatest qualitative impact on smart city development. As a result, convolving the approaches to the development of a smart city according to various criteria makes possible highlighting the most optimal decision-making process.