Abstract
The concept of sustainability is widely seen as fundamental to set up urban and territorial transformations. Sustainable development is a multidimensional and multi-perspective process that deals with the environmental, economic, and social dimensions, with the aim to find a balance among these. Despite this growing attention to sustainability the social perspective has been the less explored of these dimensions and only recently it is receiving consideration due the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that aim at creating sustainable and inclusive cities and communities. In the SDGs, specific attention is focused on the improvement of the quality of life of inhabitants through specific actions dedicated to the valorization of cultural resources, to the protection of the environment, and also to promote the involvement of the local communities in setting policies and programs. The final objective is defining projects based on the social needs shared by the communities. This paper aims at exploring the social sustainability related to urban regeneration processes with particular attention to social cohesion and community engagement. Six different urban regeneration strategies, developed for the regeneration of an urban area located in Northern Italy and based on social housing interventions, have been evaluated in accordance with their social impacts on the stakeholders involved. The paper proposes a multi-methodological approach based on the combination of the stakeholder analysis with the NAIADE (Novel Approach to Imprecise Assessment and Decision Environments) methodology, a particular type of Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation. The stakeholder analysis has been applied to identify the actors to involve in the evaluation, whereas the NAIADE methodology has been implemented for the selection of the most preferable strategy. This method allowed the assessment of the different strategies through the comparison and the mediation between the technical and the social rankings, thus considering the stakeholder preferences in the final evaluation. The final result is coherent with the initial purpose and it demonstrates that the inclusion of the stakeholder is fundamental for the achievement of a consensus solution.
Highlights
During this last decade, social sustainability has been recognized as a fundamental component of sustainable development
This paper aims at exploring the social sustainability related to urban regeneration processes with particular attention to social cohesion and community engagement
The stakeholder analysis has been applied to identify the actors to involve in the evaluation, whereas the NAIADE methodology has been implemented for the selection of the most preferable strategy
Summary
Social sustainability has been recognized as a fundamental component of sustainable development. The final aim of this definition was putting the urban sustainability debate in relation with the physical environment (e.g., housing, urban design, public spaces) and its transformation, to assess the social impacts on the community involved in the regeneration process [17]. Considering both the necessity of a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze and assess social sustainability and the absence of consensus on which method to apply [10,18,19], this paper proposes the application of an integrated method based on the Social Multi-Criteria Analysis [20]. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes and compares the main approaches used to assess social sustainability; Section 3 is focused on the description of the NAIADE methodology to summarize its main characteristics; Section 4 is related to the presentation of the real case study and to the illustration of the evaluation process; Section 5 includes some final remarks and the future perspective
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