Explore the vast range of titles available.

The evaluation of real estate assets is currently one of the main focal points addressed by territorial marketing strategies, with the view of developing high-performing or competitive cities. Given the complexity of the driving forces that determine the behavior of actors in a real estate market, it is necessary to identify a priori the factors that determine the competitive capacity of a city, to attract investments. The decision support system allows taking into account the key factors that determine the “attractiveness” of real estate investments in competitive urban contexts. This study proposes an integrated complex evaluation model that is able to map out and encapsulate the multidimensional spectrum of factors that shape the attractiveness of alternative real estate options. The conceptual–methodological approach is illustrated by an application of the model to a real-world case study of investment choice in the residential sector of Naples.

The complexity of decision making about cultural heritage has drawn attention to hybrid and innovative models to support the challenge of its enhancement. In this context, public–private partnership (PPP) has emerged as a promising tool to address the public administration’s lack of financial resources. However, several barriers have hindered the wide application of PPPs to support heritage enhancement initiatives, thus highlighting the need to provide decision-making processes with appropriate methodological tools, especially in contexts such as UNESCO sites, where heritage conservation rises to a global challenge. Based on these premises, the paper proposes a methodological approach to support decision making about implementing PPPs for heritage enhancement in UNESCO sites by evaluating the financial sustainability of different PPP scenarios, while considering their ability to ensure a fair distribution of benefits between the public and the private. After providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between PPPs and UNESCO sites in Italy, such an approach was tested on a case study, the “I Sassi di Matera” site that, over the last decades, has made PPPs a central tool for its enhancement strategy. The test results reveal the opportunities of the proposed approach to inform decision making and delve into PPP’s potential for heritage enhancement while outlining the related future research perspectives to ensure its broad scalability to other UNESCO contexts.

In recent decades, the debate concerning the conservation of built heritage has begun to acknowledge the benefits of involving local communities in this process. Despite this recognition, however, the role played by local communities in heritage affairs in practice remains marginal, and the idea of ‘heritage communities’ proposed by the Faro Convention has not yet become a reality. An effective change in this paradigm that focuses on identifying local communities as focal entities in the process of the conservation of built heritage must involve a recognition of their heritage resources and, thus, the availability of appropriate value bases that can help local communities recognise the social value of built heritage assets. Indeed, this value dimension continues to be viewed as less notable than other values that have been recognised as ‘essential’ with respect to conservation. In light of these premises, this paper aims to overcome existing differences and conflicts in the discourse concerning heritage social value by providing a comprehensive framework of value types that can guide efforts to assess the social value of built heritage. In this sense, a multidisciplinary review and investigation of different theoretical domains that have addressed the topic of social value are proposed. Such an investigation can provide a basic reference for efforts to overcome this gap and explore the influences, connections, and contradictions that occur among different disciplines, thus providing a comprehensive theoretical framework in this context. Finally, the paper discusses various opportunities, limitations, and future challenges pertaining to efforts to identify the social value of built heritage as the core of decision processes concerning conservation.

This contribution focuses on the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) as an important tool to ensure sustainable development and reach a high level of environmental protection. More specifically, this paper provides an evaluation method based on the integration of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Multi-criteria Analysis—named Integrated Spatial Multi-criteria Decision Support System (ISMDSS)—to support the preparation of environmental assessment reports and the construction of scenarios for the adoption of urban plans, as an innovative tool that integrates objectives and multidimensional (economic, environmental, and social) components, as well as different approaches and models for the construction of a long-term shared vision. In particular, considerations are made by presenting a thought-provoking case study on the SEA of the urban plan of the municipality of Marzano di Nola, located in the province of Avellino in the Campania region. The experiment carried out showed the potentiality of the ISMDSS to evaluate the impacts of different scenarios with the aim of developing a sustainable urban municipal plan. The spatial dimension is useful in understanding the dynamics that characterize each environmental topic in a specific area, by considering not only the components of the natural and developed environment, but also the interactions with social and economic components.

Considering the growing importance and widespread adoption of temporary approaches to urban transformations, the paper deals with the open research challenge of understanding the economic impacts of tactical urban interventions. Moving from a literature review on the impacts of urban regeneration projects, it proposes an investigation approach from a local economy growth perspective. This approach is applied to the “Piazze Aperte” programme, which was implemented by the municipality of Milan in 2018. Its preliminary results return a possible positive contribution of tactical urban experiences on the reference neighbourhoods’ business dynamics. It seems to unfold about the different neighbourhoods’ specificities and the intervention area’s urban morphology.

In the last decades, the emergence of new social, environmental, and economic demands, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has led urban planning to innovate its themes, methods, and approaches. In this context, temporary urbanism has emerged as a mainstream approach. How-ever, the impacts of temporary approaches to urban planning are far from being fully understood. In this light, this study focuses on one of the mainstream approaches to temporary urbanism, tactical urbanism, and tries to understand its economic impacts on contemporary cities. Indeed, despite the growing interest in tactical urbanism interventions and their value as an urban regeneration tool, there are no specific reflections focused on investigating their economic effects. Based on these premises, this paper focuses on different tactical urbanism experiences in the Italian context and tries to assess the economic impacts of tactical urbanism interventions by adopting the lens of real estate values as a suitable proxy when dealing with urban environments. The first obtained results show that the experiences of tactical urbanism, partly because of their temporary nature and their tendency toward minimal intervention, fail to trigger regeneration processes or produce significant economic impacts on the territory. Instead, such experiences can play a role in accelerating or consolidating urban regeneration processes already underway, and, in this sense, they contribute to the generation of economic impact on the territory.

The recognition of the key role of architectural heritage for sustainable territorial development has pushed the scientific community to give more importance to the involvement of local communities in conservation choices and practices. However, despite the recognition of the benefits deriving from the active participation of local communities in the field of conservation, in practice, this involvement is still marginal and linked to experiences without institutional support. This phenomenon is due to different causes, such as the lack of a participatory culture in conservation. It finds its roots in a conventional approach to architectural heritage conservation merely based on an “expert knowledge”. Consequently, there is an urgent need for approaches and tools to manage the complexity of decisions about conservation, which require close collaboration between local communities, research, and institutions. In this context, the paper aims to investigate the role of the action-research approach in fostering the participation of local communities in conservation processes, especially in marginal areas, where the demographic shrinking dynamics make even more necessary both the institutions’ intervention and the communities’ engagement. Based on these premises, starting from an analysis of recent experiences, the contribution dwells on the need to support the implementation of action-research approaches for the conservation of architectural heritage in marginal areas, paying particular attention to the role of evaluation. More in detail, in the first part of the paper, a reflection on the importance of community involvement for heritage conservation is proposed based on the main documents on the topic. In the second part, the main features of the action-research approach and its strengths and weaknesses have been analyzed through a literature review of action-research experiences applied to architectural heritage at a global level. The analyses have highlighted how most of these experiences are born from spontaneous initiatives, without institutional and methodological support, in which the role of evaluation is still marginal. Therefore, in the final part, the paper proposes a first methodological framework based on integrating action research with the main evaluation tools developed in the scientific literature to support the different phases of the decision-making process. This framework, suitably declined according to the specificities of the case study treated, can represent a valid support for implementing and transposing the research-action approach for heritage conservation in an institutional context.

Abandoned areas such as neglected railways and urban voids represent a suitable opportunity for the regeneration and requalification of cities, according to the paradigms of sustainability and resilience. Urban transformation and urban regeneration processes are characterized by a high level of complexity, a dynamic behavior over time and interactions between the various actors involved in the process. Within this context, the present paper proposes the application of a combined evaluation framework, based on the integration of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) with a Financial Analysis (FA) to assess different strategic scenarios for the regeneration of the Rogoredo railways area (Milan, Italy). The purpose of this framework is to take into account the complexity of the decision- making process, considering both the qualitative (social and environmental) and quantitative (economic- financial) aspects. In detail, the railway yards in the Rogoredo area in Milan (Italy) represent an emblematic case. The city of Milan, within the Territory Governance Plan (PGT), has already proposed interventions in this site aimed at reconnecting the infrastructural node and making it an attractive and inclusive pole. The present paper demonstrates the usefulness of evaluation procedures in supporting the entire decision-making process and defining the most suitable scenario considering the initial objective and the stakeholders’ interests. The innovative value provided by this application is represented precisely by the possibility of considering both the developer point of view through FA and the broader public perspective through the support of MCDA. This approach allowed to build and evaluate transformation scenarios capable of both attracting potential investors and promoting sustainable mobility models, social inclusion, eco-sustainable development, improvement of environmental quality through the design of new public areas, green spaces, and services for citizens.

Physical spaces and assets vary in legal nature and as such can be subjected to both private and public ownership. Therefore, rights and obligations connected with the use and enjoyment of the different goods depends on the juridic nature of the good itself. In the Italian legal framework, private goods are subject to homogeneous regulation, whereas public goods might comprehend a plethora of heterogeneous categories each of them featuring a specific legal regulation. Among those, collective-owned goods present a complex case as they have the typical characteristics of common goods but might be the object of specific rival and exclusive rights that are guaranteed to certain communities with the system of “civic use rights” (usi civici). This peculiar legal regime is typical of rural areas, where, traditionally, common ownership of the land was pursued and encouraged resulting in the creation of a common agri-sylvan-pastoral heritage. As such, the areas susceptible to being left behind or even abandoned due to a lack of public resources or initiatives that can foster their intrinsic cultural, social, and economic value. We intend collective goods to be long-term physical assets that trigger ecosystems of social entrepreneurial, innovative partnerships, and impact investing that can meet long-lasting and/or emerging social and collective needs. This paper aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, we investigate the Italian juridical regime of “shared-ownership rights” and “civic use rights” aiming to define a taxonomy that provides support in categorising these goods according to pre-defined legal clusters. Secondly, we explore the evaluation issues related to land appraisal processes.

Background: Hospital infrastructures account for a significant portion of healthcare expenditures, yet the factors driving facility management costs (FMCs) remain underexplored, particularly in the Italian context. This study aims to analyze FMCs in hospitals, focusing on utility and maintenance expenses, while providing benchmarking values to support decision making. Methods: This study employed a mixed-methods approach, integrating a literature review, financial data analysis, and a case study of 27 hospital facilities in Lombardy. Data on utility and maintenance costs were collected from financial statements and supplemented with targeted questionnaires to enhance precision. Descriptive statistics and parametric cost indicators (e.g., EUR/sqm, EUR/bed) were analyzed to identify trends and disparities. Results: FMC increased by an average of 32.90% between 2019 and 2022, with utility expenses constituting 77.45% of total costs and maintenance accounting for 22.45%. Utility costs rose significantly (37.34%), driven by energy and cleaning services, while maintenance costs grew more moderately (18.66%). Cost variability was evident across hospital typologies, with Basic Healthcare Centers averaging 122.86 EUR/sqm compared to 232.66 EUR/sqm for Level II Emergency Hospitals. Conclusions: This study highlights significant variability in FMCs across Italian hospitals and underscores the need for benchmarking to optimize resource allocation. Future research should expand the dataset, incorporating extraordinary maintenance costs, and examine management models to enhance cost efficiency. These findings provide actionable insights for policymakers and healthcare administrators to improve hospital infrastructure sustainability and efficiency.