Abstract
The promotion of rehabilitation is an urgent necessity in today’s consolidated cities, both due to the need to update their buildings to achieve habitability and safety standards that are required nowadays, as well as to stop the deterioration of buildings in vulnerable environments, where paradoxically the obtainment of economic resources to invest in building maintenance and upgrade is scarcer. Decision making on the delimitation of areas in which the need to invest is higher is extremely complex and often relies on large secondary data studies that are contrasted with local stakeholders’ intuition and knowledge on the ground. Usually, rehabilitation aids are directed to relatively large areas, where a certain need may be found. However, these areas are often excessively wide and specific needs that would require special focus can be diluted in the whole. The current trend of area-based and site-specific rehabilitation programs calls for precise and focused data studies and methodologies. The research presented here provides a methodology for the selection of priority areas to promote rehabilitation in the context of Barcelona’s vulnerable neighborhoods. The selection methodology combines primary and secondary data with a very high level of disaggregation that identifies where the needs are greatest, and it also provides a tool that is still based on primary disaggregated data for the delimitation of areas. The results obtained highlight specific priority areas such as parts of the Raval, Carmel and Besòs-Maresme neighborhoods within larger zones that had been previously defined as vulnerable. The proposed methodology seeks to provide tools to foster evidence-based decision making, thus improving both the understanding of reality and its spatial distribution through data mining techniques and data visualization.
Highlights
Its application in rehabilitation policies’ decision making is interesting, because their existing intervention tools need to be applied per sector, yet refer most frequently to the building scale, and to a very disaggregated unit of analysis
The structural turn from the traditional parameters of the functioning of public administrations and decision making in our cities is emphasizing on social emergency situations in order to try to diminish the hardest effects of the 2008 financial crisis and turning point
Urban entrepreneurship is a proactive strategy that, in contrast to traditional actions, local governments purpose with the pursuit of sovereignty to overcome situations of social, residential and economic vulnerability and risk [46,47]
Summary
It is possible to resume them into three main scales or types of intervention: a first universal type of program that refers to the whole city and can foster any kind of rehabilitation action; a second thematic type of program that can address the issue of accessibility or, more recently, energy performance; and an integrated type of program that is addressed to a site or small area and that is often interlinked with other programs of housing, economy or social policies. While there is debate on the disadvantages of treating small areas through area-based approaches, such as the possibility to intervene on the effects and not on the causes of the problems, it is increasingly common to address public rehabilitation investments as a tool for the redistribution of wealth and social and environmental justice in disadvantaged areas of cities [3]
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