Maria Rosa Trovato

The choice problem of the urban performances to support the Pachino's redevelopment plan

The historic centres, by using a large sustainability concept, should be the places where the quality and the symbolic values may prevail on the quantitative and functional ones, but often, the poor resources and the low quality of the management do not allow to promote a sustainable retraining process for them. The plan decision makers should verify the impact of the technical choices and then the sustainability of the actions, but also the impact of the planning policies on the economic performance and then on the economic sustainability of these actions. Therefore they must be helped to identify the planning actions, their funds and the value system they want to promote. In this regard, this study proposes a model to support the management of the retraining plan for Pachinos historic centre. The proposed model is a DSS that is developed using the MAUT and the IMO-DRSA tool.

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.

From Surface to Core: A Multi-Layer Approach for the Real Estate Market Analysis of a Central Area in Catania

The proposed study deals with the analysis of the real estate market in the quarter of San Cristoforo in Catania, trying to integrate different approaches to define its possible articulation in submarkets. The first one is a phenomenal type of approach that intends to represent some of the most manifest characteristics, and provides an initial hypothesis of classification of the cases (a census has been taken of) and delimitation of the segments, taking into account the ranges of prices registered inside the different classes of the characteristics. The second consists of an in-depth clustering analysis basing on three different hypotheses of three, four and five clusters respectively. The third one is a DRSA application, which is meant to extract from the studied sample a set of rules for the possible definition of a segment representing the general market rules. Given the complexity of the studied context, the results allow different interpretations and considerations of method.

Functions and Perspectives of Public Real Estate in the Urban Policies: The Sustainable Development Plan of Syracuse

This study deals with the problem of the negotiation between public and private actors in the urban planning, in the case study of the Plan for the Sustainable Development of Syracuse (Italy). The contribution focuses on the modalities of execution of the Plan that envisages the tool of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP). The study intends to verify the equity of the negotiation mechanism and the advantage gained by the public actor from conferring two large buildings to a Real Estate Fund. The contribution is structured in three parts. The first part provides the general programmatic and valuation frame referring to the features of the area. It describes the overall development perspectives and therefore the whole process of real estate development that would be supported by means of the contribution of the fund. The second part describes the implementation of a cash flow analysis based on a hypothesis of use of the buildings previously outlined. The third part provides the elements of the analysis of the investment that are retroactive on the design hypotheses converging on the value assessed to determine the quota of participation of the Municipality in the Real Estate Fund.

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.

Gaps and Overlaps of Urban Housing Sub-market: Hard Clustering and Fuzzy Clustering Approaches

It has long been argued that the housing market is spatially subdivided within an urban area. The argument has important implications for explaining how the housing market works and describing the distinctiveness of each housing submarkets, having determined, a priori, its segmentation. The most commonly used method for identifying housing submarkets is based on cluster analysis, although hedonic analysis has been extensively used. The hedonic analysis is used to derive dimensionality of the housing market by estimating what attributes are significant factors influencing housing price. Those attributes or variables can then be used for cluster analysis. The paper proposes an analysis of the real estate market in San Cristoforo, Catania, trying to integrate two different clustering analysis approaches to defining its possible submarkets articulation. The first one is a hard clustering approach using the K-means method and hypothesizing different numbers of clusters. The second one can be considered a verification of the previous results: a fuzzy algorithm is applied to obtain the fuzzy set membership degree of each data point to housing submarkets defined within the examined urban area. The comparison between the results coming from the two different approaches suggests some reflections about the use of these powerful techniques for integrating the knowledge of the complex and multi-layered real estate markets in the urban recovery policies.

A DSS to Assess and Manage the Urban Performances in the Regeneration Plan: The Case Study of Pachino

The historic centers, by using a large sustainability concept, should be the places where the quality and the symbolic values may prevail on the quantitative and functional ones, but often, the poor resources and the low quality of the management do not allow to promote a sustainable retraining process for them. The plan decision makers should verify the impact of the technical choices and then the sustainability of the actions, but also the impact of the planning policies on the economic performance and then on the economic sustainability of these actions. Therefore they must be helped to identify the planning actions, their funds and the value system they want to promote. In this regard, this study proposes a model to support the management of the retraining plan for Pachino’s historic center. The proposed model is a DSS that is developed using the MAUT and the IMO-DRSA tool.

An Evaluation Model for the Actions in Supporting of the Environmental and Landscaping Rehabilitation of the Pasquasia’s Site Mining (EN)

The mining activities in Sicily, over the years, have had a gradual decline until to their total abandonment, determining a degradation process for the territory and the landscape. This abandonment process, has increased the vulnerable of these sites, that often, are became incubators or sprinklers of some poisons, in them illegally allocated, becoming dangerous for the agricultural activities, the water tables, and the health of the communities nearest. Among the mining sites in Sicily’s most historic and cultural interest, which in recent years has been recalled for some cases of environmental damage, there is the Pasquasia’ site (EN). After the closed and the abandoned in the 1992, it was transformed into an open dump of the hazardous waste; in particular of the asbestos cement type. The study suggests, at starting to a baseline scenario as that of the remediation for the site, an evaluation model for some redevelopment integrated actions.

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.