Assessing Socio-Economic Sustainability of Urban Regeneration Programs: An Integrated Approach

Traditionally, the assessment of urban and territorial transformation scenarios has been based on the application of economic analysis, such as cost-benefit analysis. Many authors have highlighted the limits of economic analysis in addressing urban and territorial transformation decision problems; these limits are mainly related to a reductionist approach that does not enable consideration of the overall complexity of the system, and to the impossibility of including stakeholders in the decision-making process. For these reasons, methods belonging to the family of Multicriteria Analysis have become more and more important, even if drawbacks related to the use of non conventional procedures and to the difficulties of conducting the analysis have been put in evidence. The paper explores the use of a hybrid approach based on the combination of economic analysis and multicriteria analysis for supporting decision-making processes in the context of urban regeneration processes. In particular, the article investigates the construction of an integrated evaluation model able to consider both qualitative and quantitative information and both economic and extra-economic data in order to provide a socio-economic rating of alternative regeneration projects or strategies. Starting with a real case study related to a social housing estate located in Northern Italy, the paper illustrates the proposed integrated approach for rating four different strategies for the regeneration of the site.