Integrated Evaluation Methodology for Urban Sustainable Projects

The projects for cities’ development must comply with multiple instances defined according to the sustainability dimensions, i.e. economic, social and environmental ones. Even in the light of the most demanding international governmental and other current provisions for climate-change adaptation, initiatives of public and/or private interest must be evaluated on the basis of their performance level in the perspective of economic growth, environmental protection and social well-being. The present paper focuses on the following issues: i) the economic-sustainable evaluation of urban design-solutions; ii) how to carry out integrated evaluations that systematically include multiple aspects while respecting the interests involved. The use of multi-criteria analysis methods if, on the one hand, contributes to the achievement of commingling among dissimilar semantic-assessment fields, on the other hand, it is characterized by the difficulty of taking into account the interests of all the stakeholders able to affect the intervention priority among investment alternatives in urban context. The work aims at describing an integrated evaluation methodology based, on the one hand, on the syntactic-operational formalism of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and, on the other one, on the implementation of an analytical technique of a descriptive-participatory type (SWOT analysis + focus group) for the definition of evaluation criteria and relative weights for the sustainable evaluation of projects.