Grazia Napoli

Financial Sustainability and Morphogenesis of Urban Transformation Project

The urban transformation projects are very complex and have to be examined from several points of view (socio-cultural, environmental, infrastructural, administrative, and economic-financial) to determine their sustainability. This study aims to test the financial analysis as a tool for outlining the morphogenesis of the project’s characteristics and exploring the frontiers of the financial feasibility especially when the urban projects, according to Italian laws, involve Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). A financial model is applied to a case study (the transformation of an abandoned railway area) in which the absence of an adequate returns on investment, because of the crisis of the real estate market, requires one to iteratively modify the project’s characteristics and define various alternative scenarios for obtaining the project’s form that achieves the financial feasibility.

Industrial Areas and the City. Equalization and Compensation in a Value-Oriented Allocation Pattern

This study deals with the allocation of the firms in a large industrial area of Quarto, a town in the Naples’ district subject to a “Piano di Insediamenti Industriali” – PIP (Industrial Settlement Masterplan). The main concern of the Municipality is the fair integration between environmental issues, economic development and urban identity. Therefore a structured evaluation process, based on a survey about the company profiles and their geographical location, has been carried out in order to make the plan meet the needs of the firms, and to select the best companies to settle in the planned area. A “generative” MAVT pattern has been designed to outline several layout options and to select the best ones. The model also includes equalization and compensation elements by whose means it is possible to determine the extraordinary planning permission fees for the different areas where the firms are located.

Fair Planning and Affordability Housing in Urban Policy. The Case of Syracuse (Italy)

Equalization can be implemented in the planning process by means of several tools. The Syracuse’s Master Plan has used “urban negotiation” to obtain land for facilities and public infrastructure in different urban areas basing on the rule of the transfer of a portion of land in return for the building permission for the remaining part of each property to be developed. The Master Plan also aimed at providing social housing because the economic crisis has amplified the gap between housing market prices and household income. This study proposes an equalization and compensation model to support the urban negotiation for providing the indexes of a fair and convenient development of several interstitial urban areas. Some different scenarios, based on an equalization pattern, are prefigured to provide affordable housing for low-income households.

Forms and Functions of the Real Estate Market of Palermo (Italy). Science and Knowledge in the Cluster Analysis Approach

The analysis of the housing market of a city requires suitable approaches and tools, such as data mining models, to represent its complexity which derives on many elements, e.g. the type of capital asset-house is a common good and an investment good as well, the heterogeneity of the urban areas—each of them has own historical and representative values and different urban functions—and the variability of building quality. The housing market of the most densely populated area of Palermo (Italy), corresponding to ten districts, is analyzed to verify the degree of its inner homogeneity and the relations between the quality of the characteristics and the price of the properties. Five hundred sets of housing data have been collected and elaborated by cluster analysis with the aim of describing the structure of the housing market in each district and developing operational tools for the implementation of urban policies and public-private investments.

An Application of Analytic Network Process in the Planning Process: The Case of an Urban Transformation in Palermo (Italy)

The primary objective of this study is to test the multicriteria analysis application in favor of a selection process among alternative transformations of an urban area in the city of Palermo. The choice is referred to as a strategyoriented one aiming to create “new urban centralities” able to redraw all urban structures that start to activate renewal processes within the existing city. The application of multicriteria analysis technique, such as the Analytic Network Process (ANP) - BOCR model, is due to the need to represent the complexity of the decision problem characterized by interrelations among several elements described by many indicators from different levels. The case study is also an opportunity to verify how the multicriteria analysis can contribute to the decision in the presence of mixed information, such as quantitative and qualitative ones. The application of the sensitivity analysis allows knowing and considering the conditions that can modify the earlier ranking of alternatives.

A Paradigm Interpreting the City and the Analytic Network Process for the Management of Urban Transformations

When urban and environmental transformations occur in areas where the equilibrium between nature and culture is complex and fragile, public administrations could decide to induce private investments using several tools, such as financial contributions to those projects of refurbishment that better respect the purpose of improving the environmental quality and of preserving the local architecture. Multicriteria models may support public decision process regarding this issue, but it is essential to adopt a scientific paradigm that provides a major theoretical reference. This study proposes the development of a network model based on the scientific paradigm by Rizzo and the Analytic Network Process. The first one has been chosen because of its interpretation of the city as autopoietic organization, dissipative structure and political-administrative system, the second one because of its holistic representation of the decision problem in which the interactions between all the elements are made explicit. The network model has been applied to a case study that consists in ranking some alternative refurbishments of buildings in Favignana (Egadi islands, Italy) in order to grant public financial contributions.

The Urban Being Between Environment and Landscape. On the Old Town as an Emerging Subject

The landscape units of the Sicilian mountainous inland, as for the case of Petralia Soprana, are marked by the presence of ancient urban centres controlling the agricultural territory, from which they derived their own wealth, and to which they conferred landscape significance. The unity between economy and landscape has been interrupted by the radical transformation of the socio-economic structure and the technologic progress, which have eroded the consistency between structures and superstructures. We propose an assessment approach based on a synthesis of semiotic and phenomenological view. The approach mainly focuses on the basic concepts and contents of the valuation process that can be assumed as the theoretical premise for the operational tool.

The Complexity of Value and the Evaluation of Complexity: Social Use Value and Multi-criteria Analysis

The “challenge of complexity” is one of the many points of convergence between the Encyclical Laudato si’ and the evolution of post-modern scientific thought. This study aims to analyze how complexity represents the essential element of the profound renewal in the scientific paradigm of the discipline of evaluation, particularly in regard to the theory of value, the categories of value, and the instruments of multi-criteria evaluation. Some contemporary theories of value propose, in fact, a complex source of value, such as surpluses of energy and of information (Ecological Economics) or as the creative and synergistic combination of three surpluses, namely energetic and non-entropic, genealogical-ecological, and scientific-cultural (the “Nuova Economia” of Francesco Rizzo). These theories derive from a new interpretative key founded on the alliance between the natural sciences and the humanities. The creation of new categories of value, the social use value and the total economic value, constitute, moreover, the response of the science of evaluation to the social and disciplinary need to express a complex value that goes beyond both the private use value and the (normal and speculative) exchange value, and which include the multiplicity of values (ethical, aesthetic, economic, cultural, scientific, political, juridical, and equitable) that express the human being as a whole, no longer reduced merely to the homo economicus. The demand for the resolution of complex problems involving public and private territorial assets has led to the elaboration of models of multi-criteria evaluation through which to recompose the conflicting dualities of equity/efficiency, quality/quantity, and local/global into a uni-duality. In these models, the absence of a monetary unit of measurement constitutes an opportunity for re-founding a system of common social values and for allowing the participation of local communities in decision-making processes (Bentivegna 2016). The evaluation discipline, furthermore, may continue to participate directly in the great cultural, spiritual, and educational challenges contained in the Encyclical, to change the style of life and the patterns of production and consumption, making its own contribution in three spheres: scientific-cultural, through studies and research orientated towards the promotion of the culture of complexity, of multidisciplinarity, and of environmental protection; social-territorial, through collaboration with public institutions to elaborate operative instruments (models) of social participation in local decision-making processes; and educational, through the qualification and training of architects and engineers.