Francesca Torrieri

Sustainable Urban Land Use and Transportation Planning: A Cognitive Decision Support System for the Naples Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT Increasing needs for higher mobility are often met by design and implementation of new infrastructure provisions. The challenging question is whether this choice increases the general political objective of sustainable development. In this context, also the land-use and transportation interfaces have to be envisaged. The article aims to offer a methodological/operational contribution to sustainable mobility policy in the Naples metropolitan area (in the Campania Region1, Italy). Scenario analysis is used to design combined land-use/transportation plans to be assessed from a sustainability perspective. Long-range choice options are evaluated using inter alia a sophisticated multicriteria analysis (i.e., hierarchical Regime method). Sensitivity analyses will test the robustness of policy rank order solutions found by the above multicriteria analysis. 1The case study is part of a test project of the land use/transport laboratory of the Regional Centre of Competence funded by the Campania Region in the Operative Regional Program 2000–2006 (measure 3.13) and coordinated by Prof. Vincenzo Torrieri.

Property Value, Urban Quality and Maintenance Condition: A Hedonic Analysis in the City of Naples, Italy

The article examines the relationship between property value and level of conservation of public urban space. While many studies have examined the effect of proximity of open space, parks, and trees on property value, there has been few examination of how projects of urban revitalization and ordinary and extraordinary maintenances of public spaces can influence property values. While intuition can suggest that a low level of quality and maintenance of a public space can negatively affect property value, even if the standard requirement of public spaces and services are meet, this yet to be empirically proven.We proposes the application of a new econometric models for quantitative analysis of the characteristics of real estate property (Generalized Additive Model), to assess the impact of maintenance condition on property values, due to the better prevision that these functions can obtain in a real estate market context.The control of the formal and logical adequacy of the proposed theoretical model is referred to the case study under analysis, in the city of Naples. The results obtained show that a well preserved urban environment influences property price by approximately 6%. The experimental test of the model has provided results that, by reason of their formal consistency with the results obtained in other contexts, can be considered representative of the effectiveness of the methodology proposed.

Estimation of Risk-Return for Real Estate Investments by Applying Ellwood’s Model and Real Options Analysis: An Application to the Residential Real Estate Market of Naples

In the present study was developed an application of a model derived from Ellwood’s financial analysis and Real Options Analysis for estimating the risk-return in the residential real estate market of Naples. With the aim of reducing the uncertainty related to the determination of the risk and return for an property investment, starting of real estate investment layout derived from the Ellwood’s model, latter defined by financial income and costs related to the period of property availability, a risk analysis with Real Options Analysis has been implemented, in order to obtain the evolution of the investment value until the year in which it is convenient to recover the initial capital. This model has allowed to determine a capitalization rate for a general area of reference, that it can adapt on further effects of specific factors and intrinsic characteristics of the property being valued. It also allows to define uniquely the investment duration, in terms of availability period of property.

Un modello spaziale di valutazione economica del rischio alluvioni

Il dl. 49/2010, emanato in attuazione alla direttiva 2007/60/CE, ha introdotto, in Italia, l’obbligo per le aree a rischio alluvione della predisposizione di ‘Piani di gestione del rischio’ (pgra) al fine di ridurre le conseguenze delle inondazioni sulla salute umana, l’ambiente, il patrimonio culturale e le attivita economiche. La nuova sfida tecnico-scientifica, soprattutto in un territorio complesso e vulnerabile come quello italiano, appare quella di progettare un pgra fondato su un insieme di opere capaci di configurare uno scenario di equilibrio tra obiettivi di sostenibilita finanziaria, ambientale e sociale e grado di sicurezza. Lo studio in oggetto si pone l’obiettivo di esaminare le problematiche legate alla stima dei costi e benefici di progetti di mitigazione del rischio da alluvioni, al fine di proporre un modello di valutazione economica spaziale, sviluppato in ambiente gis, basato sulla logica degli scenari

Infrastructure Development and Territorial Vulnerability. The Role of Composite Indicators for Addressing Siting Decisions

Composite indicators have been analyzed by several scholars, especially with the aim of defining standardization and aggregation rules consistent to the multidimensional theoretical framework underlying these kind of measures and adequate to the difficulty of comparing data of different nature. Starting from a broadly shared methodology, set up by OECD in 2008, the paper proposes a Composite Indicator of Territorial Vulnerability based on environmental, social and economic criteria. A special attention has been paid to the methodological approach more than to the results, with a focus on uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. The latter one has been developed by the use of the SimLab (http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu), which has allowed to estimate the probability distribution function of the composite indicator and to point out the field of variation of its variables. Lombardy Region has been selected as a pilot case study since it is one of the Italian regions with the highest infrastructural development. The results show that the Composite Indicator of Territorial Vulnerability applied to municipalities in the Lombardy Region has a limited variation range, and thus low uncertainty. Furthermore, the synthetic measure of territorial vulnerability seems to be a promising decision aid tool in the field of regional infrastructural development policies.

Public and Private Benefits in Urban Development Agreements

The paper is aimed at exploring the advantages of public authorities within the context of negotiating Public Private Partnership (PPP). During recent years, many European cities have developed complex urban interventions through innovative forms of cooperation between the public and private sector. Given the limited public funds to cover investments and the need to increase the quality and efficiency of public services, this kind of PPP enables public and private sectors to define agreements with respect to future urban development interventions. Starting from an analysis of the urban developments under PPP carried out in Lombardy region over the last 15 years, the paper provides an overview of surplus values that result from land-use changes and development with the aim of pointing out the allocation between public and private parties. Despite the difficulty of performing an ex-post evaluation of surplus values, meaning the difference between the asset values before and after transformation, mainly for the limited and incomplete economic data recorded by the agreement, some preliminary insights are drawn, and a first operational framework is suggested to evaluate the sustainability of the urban development interventions from a public perspective.

A Mass Appraisal Model Based on Multi-criteria Evaluation: An Application to the Property Portfolio of the Bank of Italy

This paper presents an application of multicriteria evaluation to select the property characteristics in order to estimate the most probable market value of a large public property portfolio. The methodology proposed, based on the involvement of key actors of the decision process, aim to support the decision process of value judgment in a more flexible way overcoming the difficulty presented by econometric models due to the scarcity of a large sample data; it is referred to a multi-parameter estimated model and tested on a large property portfolio owned by the Bank of Italy. The application has shown that this type of procedures can be a reliable tool to analyse the real estate values and solve estimation problems concerning consistent real estate assets on which analytical methods and regression models are hardly applicable due to the scarcity of data.

Land Value Capture by Urban Development Agreements: The Case of Lombardy Region (Italy)

This paper focuses on the interaction between land use planning and infrastructure provision, and offers an overview of the methods that are used in different development contexts to share the costs of local infrastructures and facilities between the public and the private sector. Over the last forty years or so, in the face of intense fiscal pressure and a drastic reduction in the transfer of resources from the central government, local authorities have increasingly been searching for alternative means to fund the provision of off-site infrastructures and facilities.

The Ex-ante Evaluation of Flood Damages for a Sustainable Risk Management

The present paper presents an integrated model for the ex-ante evaluation of flood damages based on “stage damages curve” as a decision support tool for public and private authorities in the sustainable management of risk areas.

An Integrated Model for Ex-ante Evaluation of Flood Damage to Residential Building

The paper presents a new integrated model for the ex-ante evaluation of flood Expected Annual Damage (EAD) with specific reference to the direct damage to residential buildings. Starting from the analysis of an existing flood-damage model developed in other contexts, we propose an integrated evaluation model based on the definition of an analytic “stage damage curve” for different typology of residential buildings. The model is based on the integration of hydraulic model, combined with an ex-ante damage evaluation model, as a decision-support tool for sustainable risk management. Finally, combining hazard and vulnerability levels by using a GIS-based toolbox, the EAD to an urban area is obtained. The proposed model is then tested in a residential urban area of the municipality of Olbia in Italy, which was damaged by the extraordinary flood on November 2013. The comparison, between the ex-post assessed damage and the ex-ante evaluation based on the application of the model, enables to verify high reliability of the results obtained.