Bottero M.; D’Alpaos C.; Oppio A. (2019).

Decision-Making for Urban Planning and Regional Development. Hindawi, Advances in Operations Research, Volume 2019, Article ID 5178051, 2 pages.

Abstract:

Urban and regional development can be considered as multidimensional concepts which involve socioeconomic, ecological, cultural, technical, and ethical perspectives. Decision problems in the domain of urban and regional development processes represent “weak” or unstructured problems as they are characterized by multiple actors, many and often conflicting values and views, a wealth of possible outcomes, and high uncertainty.

Under these circumstances, evaluation of alternative projects is therefore a complex decision problem, where different aspects need to be considered simultaneously, and both technical elements, based on empirical observations, and non-technical elements, based on social visions, preferences, and feelings, need to be taken into account. This complexity requires multidimensional approaches and specific qualitative/quantitative methods to analyse and synthesize the full variety of aspects involved in transformation processes, that range from the environmental impacts of urban renewal to its impacts on energy consumption/production patterns and mobility; from the social and economic impacts of a specific urban transformation strategy to its effects on landscape and cultural heritage.

This special issue addresses recent advances on the role of evaluation in supporting decision-makers in urban planning and regional development. 6 papers are published in this special issue; each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers and revised according to review comments. The accepted papers show the role of evaluation procedures to support decisions in the context of urban management and territorial transformations.