Spatial Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for Rehabilitation Priority Ranking: A Collaborative Application to Heritage Workforce Housing Sites

Abstract

ABSTRACT This work presents a methodology to rank heritage sites regarding rehabilitation, considering both the characteristics of building sites and of the urban environment in the surrounding area. The objective is to aid the decision process of building rehabilitation by ranking the sites according to their potential for re-emergence in the affordable housing rental market. The developed methodology is based on a combination of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and spatial analysis of geographical data, in order to construct an index, the “rehabilitation potential”, which is understandable by rehabilitation technicians and land managers and is applicable to support a list of priorities of building rehabilitation interventions. The methodology was applied to a case study consisting of a set of 33 heritage sites of the workforce housing typology in Lisbon. These were built in the early industrial age in Portugal and are owned by the city municipality. The application of MCDA was a collaborative process that brought together the expertise of the academy and of the public administration. The results included a sensitivity analysis and gave form to a recommendation of five sites, selected from the total workforce housing set, to be rehabilitated in the near future.