A novel multicriteria methodology for evaluating urban development proposals

Abstract

Urban development planning is the process of developing long-range policies for the future of a region, taking into consideration technical, political, social and environmental aspects. The need to incorporate the prementioned aspects, resulted in the increasing use of multicriteria approaches. One of the most common problems of urban development planning is to choose among various alternative projects. Motivated by the sustainable utilization of Athens’ Hellinikon airport, this paper proposes a methodology for the selection of the best solution for the development of the urban site under certain preconditions. The main purpose of this multicriteria methodology is to assess five alternative investment proposals for the development of the urban site. Since local policy makers are considered to be the stakeholders, the implemented evaluation method includes several criteria that are based on three main categories: economy, environment and society. The selected criteria represent relevant, controllable and measurable elements and could be used as sustainable development indicators. A questionnaire is designed to gather information from stakeholders to evaluate the degree of influence of each indicator on the selection of the proposals. A sensitivity analysis has been carried out giving different preferences from the stakeholders. This paper offers an evaluation framework based on a blend of three types of approaches, the additive value model, the Electre III and the Promethee II. The three methods have been developed in the past, however, this paper tries to offer a cohesive framework, which can be used for the evaluation of urban development proposals in the light of economic, environmental and social criteria. The results obtained by the multicriteria evaluation method showed that the alternative proposals including the exploitation of the examined region in all land uses, marked the best performances in almost all the criteria.