Abstract
Italy has adopted the strategy of inner areas, mainly based on physical distance from public services. The strategy promotes a multi-level and multi-fund governance approach and the local partnership of mayors. Our paper focuses on rural areas, identified by the national strategy of inner areas, as peripheral and ultra-peripheral, in the Italian insular region (Sicily and Sardinia). It analyzes, at the municipality level, socio-demographic, economic, and environmental sustainability using appropriate indicators. Aiming at discovering the underlying relationship portrayed by multi-attribute data in an information system, we applied rough set theory. The inductive decision rules obtained through this data mining methodology reveal the simultaneous presence or absence of important characteristics aiming at reaching different levels of sustainability. Without the requirement of statistical assumptions regarding data distribution or structures for collecting data, such as functions or equations, this method ensures the description of patterns exhibited by data. Of particular interest is the assessment of conditional attributes (i.e., the selected indicators), and the information connecting them to sustainability, as a decision attribute. The most important result is rule generation, specifically, decision rules that are able to suggest tools for policy makers at different levels.
Highlights
Within the European Union (EU), urban areas cover about 25% of the entire populated area [1]
Decision makers should focus on the interaction between the three pillars across different algorithms; for example, if in class EC, the Modified LEM (ModLEM)-Entropy algorithm does not take into consideration the economic pillar, this should be taken as an indication of how environmental and socio-demographic pillars interact in the area, where the economic pillar partially evolves in a manner that is detached from the other two pillars
We have identified the level of economic, environmental and social sustainability of selected municipalities identified as peripheral and ultra-peripheral areas and, at the same time, rural areas, located in the major islands of the Mediterranean Sea, in a national and European perspective, peripheral, as a whole
Summary
Within the European Union (EU), urban areas cover about 25% of the entire populated area [1]. Economic, cultural, and demographic differences characterize these regions, and in planning sustainable strategies for non-urban areas the choices are widely varied and heterogeneous. This huge variability means that a unique, simple, and direct political perspective is a challenging issue and, in the European multicultural framework, a common approach is even more difficult and perhaps ineffective. The main criterion with which these territories, belonging to rural areas, were identified was the distance (in terms of time) from a selected municipality to the nearest agglomeration providing services of general interest (SGIs). The wider this dimension, the greater is its periphery [6,7]
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