ABSTRACT
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 defined and categorized the concept of Ecosystem Services and the strategic role of natural capital. The need to rethink our cities and public spaces is even more pressing in the COVID-19 era. In this context, green strategies could be the answer to the new demands raised by citizens about the built and natural environment. Green roofs, along with the other green spaces, form the city’s green network, contribute to improving the quality of life and wellbeing of citizens. The present contribution aims to evaluate green roofs from an ecosystem perspective, by considering the evidence of their benefits on inhabitants’ wellbeing, their ability to mitigate climate change and preserve biodiversity. A proposal for an integrated evaluation model is presented to take into account the different dimensions of value in the study of Ecosystem Services (ESs) and to support decision makers (DMs) in the definition of actions able to increase the quality of life in cities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The marginal territories require new tools to support the construction of policies capable of activating sustainable regeneration processes. This research, inspired by the ongoing political and scientific debate on Italian fragile areas, proposes the application of a hybrid methodological approach aimed at assessing territorial vulnerability, through an analysis that combines the potential of MCDA techniques with those of GIS. The research proposes the results of a first application of the proposed methodology, with a focus on the construction of value functions concerning the multiple dimensions of vulnerability. The analysis was carried out for the Italian provinces of Alessandria and Vercelli, both crossed by the VENTO project, one of the longest Italian cycle paths with a great potential for relaunching the territories it crosses. © 2021 FrancoAngeli. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, as in many countries around the world, has imposed rigid restrictions on outdoor activities, resulting in forced confinement. The new condition requires an analysis and a rethinking of the way of life and of the new pre- and post-pandemic needs related to the use of domestic spaces, necessary to work, study or carry out other daily activities. Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, with the collaboration of the institute of studies and research Scenari Immobiliari, have launched a survey for exploring the new needs and preferences of residents. These needs, which arose in conjunction with the pandemic, concern not only the desire to readapt their homes, but also to change them. In order to investigate these preferences, a questionnaire was developed using the Best to Worst Scaling (BWS). The items consider both modifications of the internal distribution and interventions on the efficiency of domestic appliances and systems components. The study aims to highlight how the spread of the pandemic has changed housing needs and how physical space affects people’s well-being. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
From the early 1990s the quality of public space is at the centre of the Agenda of major European cities. Today, more than before, the health emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemy has pointed out the importance of the relationship among public space, quality of life and health. Public and semi-private spaces, especially in high-dense cities and in the most affected areas by Covid-19, represent a strong driver both for restarting and for helping cities to face the new normal age. Despite the advancement of research during the past two decades and empirical evidence about the relationship among quality of open spaces, quality of life and urban sustainability, there is still a lack of studies on how to measure the quality of open spaces. Among the several research lines, the Urban Design approach across its evolution has always focused on it, starting from aesthetic as well as technical issues and increasingly including the social and economic ones. The current paper proposes an integrated approach supported by Geographic Information System (GIS) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) able to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the quality of open spaces under the Urban Design perspective. In detail, the issue of urban quality has been divided into 5 criteria and 12 sub-criteria which consider both the characteristics of the built environment and its organization and the perception of users. The evaluation process has been structured according to the traditional steps – Intelligence, Design and Choice – and it has been applied to three different areas in the city of Milan, in order to achieve a broad measurement of urban quality with respect to various urban locations. What’s new in this research is the spatialization of the urban quality scores and their assessment based on specific value functions, that shows potentials for future implementations in the sphere of urban planning, where the proposed evaluation approach could be applied with different purposes: an evaluation model for supporting public and private planning agreements by the use of value maps;a companion guide with operational recommendations for open spaces design;a model to estimate the marginal price of the urban quality through hedonic price analyses. © 2021, Dei Tipografia del Genio Civile. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Cultural heritage can play a strategic role in developing a sustainable built environment, contributing to the improvement of the economic, social, and environmental productivity of a city. Human activities are constantly affecting the quality of the environment and altering the ecosystems, which produce negative consequences also on human wellbeing. Within this context, it has been much discussed how cities and the built environment can counteract this process by supporting more sustainable development. Adaptive reuse is defined as “a process that changes a disused or ineffective item into a new item that can be used for a different purpose”, which strongly triggers the sustainable development of cities. It can be recognized as a promoter of economic growth, social wellbeing, and environmental preservation, given its capability of both preserving past values and creating new ones. The adaptive reuse matches the main points of the circular economy, seen as the sustainable economy, which is aimed at the reduction of natural resource extraction and environmental impact by extending the useful life of materials and promoting recovery, reuse, and regeneration processes. Given these premises, the current contribution aimed to evaluate alternative scenarios for reuse in Castello Visconteo in Cusago, located in the Lombardy region (Italy), and understanding how adaptive reuse could contribute to generating new values within a circular economy perspective. In detail, four alternative scenarios were proposed to face the new needs born during the COVID‐19 pandemic period. Since both intangible and tangible values must be considered, a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been applied by combining economic and qualitative indicators to define the most suitable function for its adaptive reuse. In detail, the Novel Approach to Imprecise Assessment and Decision Environments (NAIADE) was used to identify the best alternative solution based on the opinions of conflicting stakeholders. The innovativeness of the contribution is given by the combination of different methodologies, the preservation of the memory and the generation of new values, and the consideration of adaptive reuse as a strategy for the achievement of sustainable development within a circular economy perspective. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.