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The provision of affordable housing for low-income households is a very complex issue long debated in many countries around the world. Social Housing (SH) is one of the tools for achieving fairness, social sustainability and economic feasibility, and is interrelated with politics, ethics and economics, as well as the environment, architecture and technology. In other words, national and local policy, and also public and private financial resources are all needed to provide SH. SH also involves social and urban transformations and is, consequently, linked to urban planning and redevelopment projects, real estate market dynamics and cooperation between public and private stakeholders. Furthermore, decision-making on SH policies and projects has to be supported by assessments of economic feasibility and social and environmental sustainability. This volume present studies on various topics to recompose the multi-faceted subjects of Social Housing within a unified framework.

To analyze the issue of cities-migrants interactions, as well as social-monetary values interactions, it is necessary to place it in a “higher” context, in order not to risk losing the necessary connection with universal ethical principles, and in a “broader” one, in which understanding complexity on a global scale interprets local conditions. The study of migration flows and urban dynamics, as well as housing markets, through theoretical paradigms and scientific tools from different disciplines provides an opportunity to learn and compare, dialogue and interface with new keys to understanding the problem, or with alternative interpretations and unprecedented perspectives in the path of multiculturalism, which has become an inescapable premise for the formation of an inclusive society. Despite different scientific and cultural backgrounds, many concepts emerge as cross-cutting, weaving a network of connections that transcends supposed disciplinary “boundaries” and, at the same time, highlights the possibility of expressing different visions and interpretations. This plurality of disciplinary expertise and cultural sensitivities, intellectual passion and willingness to confrontation can be represented by a chain of words—such as global, local, glocal, cities, territories, values, language, human dignity, human capital, citizenship, identity, cohabitation, public space, urban space—and constitutes the connotative trait of this volume in which the science of Appraisal and Valuation “measures” and compares itself with other social sciences.

Socioeconomic and functional mixité has been an objective placed at the basis of urban development to guide the transformation processes of urban areas, associating it with social inclusion as opposed to the morphological and spatial segregation, often caused by monofunctional zoning. The implementation of social mixité involves all social groups and, particularly, migrant communities that, in turn, are formed by groups with different cultures, nationalities, resources and income levels. The location choices of migrants and native residents produce an ever-changing urban geography of residential, commercial and service activities that directly impact on the real estate market. Migrants’ active participation in the urban mixité reaches its highest degree of social visibility in their use of commercial properties located on main streets, where they compete and/or cooperate with native-operated businesses. This study investigated the use of commercial properties in three main streets of Palermo during 2018-2020 to analyze the evolution of functional and socioeconomic mixité. The findings show what capacity migrant communities have to permeate the urban fabric with their commercial activities and to participate in the local real estate market currently characterized by high vacancy rates.

Social housing is an instrument of housing policies to support those groups of people who are disadvantaged due to particular economic weaknesses and/or social relational fragility. Consequently, to achieve the objective of social sustainability, the rents of social housing must be below the market rents and low enough to be affordable. Italian law has set several rent thresholds which are based on local territorial agreements between landlords and renters associations. This article aims to examine whether these thresholds generate social fairness and housing affordability within each city and between different cities, or instead inequalities and spatial asymmetries. A cluster analysis is applied to study whether the goal of fairness is achieved, while the effectiveness of providing housing affordability is assessed by comparing the benchmarked rents with those of the national ministerial Real Estate Market Observatory. Two metropolitan cities—one in the north and another in the south of Italy—with different social and economic characteristics were chosen as case studies. The results show that variations in rents, location, and housing quality are fairly consistent within urban areas and cities. However, the benchmarked rents are not consistently related to the market rents and are often higher than the latter, failing to meet the provision of affordable housing that was the primary goal of the law.

Changes in consumer shopping behavior and in retail spaces, such as shopping malls, department stores and e-commerce, have modified localization models of traditional retail shops, also affecting urban fabric and spatial distribution of urban rent. Even city centers have undergone significant transformations or even decline, especially if local economic system and real estate market are weak and recessionary. A significant amount of commercial properties may have long vacancy due to excess supply, since many traditional shops close their business because they are no longer competitive and, moreover, there is no immediate takeover by new tenants. The decline of central urban areas depends on the interaction of multiple economic, social and cultural factors, but it can be countered by urban policies oriented not only to physical redevelopment of urban fabric, but also to social cohesion and multiculturalism. Migrants bearers of varied cultural values, coming from different continents and settling permanently in the Italian cities, have rented some of these empty properties by locating retail shops specifically oriented to their own communities or also to the citizens needs. The presence of migrants contributes, indeed, to support the retail real estate demand, to mitigate the minus-valorization of real estate capital and also to contain the revenues contraction. This phenomenon has been analyzed in some streets of the historic centre of Palermo that are traditionally shopping areas and have become the privileged place for locating retail shops managed by immigrants.

Green infrastructure in urban environments provides a wide range of ecological, social, aesthetic, and health co-benefits. Urban plant covers in particular contribute to improved outdoor environmental conditions that, in turn, influence the energy behavior of buildings and their indoor thermo-hygrometric comfort performance. Within this context, this study illustrates a methodology aimed at verifying the economic feasibility of alternative types of green areas for public and private stakeholders, which are analyzed as passive energy measures. Therefore, our methodology integrates approaches from different disciplines and consists of a microclimatic analysis of different vegetation scenarios and of the outdoor comfort level, an evaluation of the energy needs of a sample of houses, and an economic feasibility estimation considering different scenarios and public and private investors. The methodology is illustrated through its application to a suburban district of the Sicilian city of Trapani in the South of Italy, considered representative of Mediterranean climate conditions. Results showed significant differences between the scenario outcomes depending on the type of vegetation used in the green areas and put in evidence how economic feasibility for some stakeholders may be achieved in the management phase if adequate incentives equal to the planting cost are assumed.

The challenge of promoting sustainable cities and reaching the objectives developed by the European Green Deal includes the renovation of the building sector, as it is responsible for 40% of energy consumption in Europe. Regional or local public administrations have to allocate their financial resources for improving the energy performances of their building stock and to face a multidimensional problem, where different aspects – such as energy efficiency, financial-economic feasibility and environmental protection – have to be harmonized. The present study proposes a Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding model, which includes the ELECTRE TRI-nC method, for supporting the public decision process of sorting alternative energy retrofitting actions into various categories, each of them expresses different levels of overall performance. The model is applied to an Italian real case study. An experts’ panel has been involved for structuring the decision problem and discussing the results. The results show that opaque envelope insulation actions are often classified in best categories to be implemented and funded instead the upgrade of the lighting system falls in the worst category. These results are useful for local or regional public administrations to select those energy retrofitting actions that have to be financed as a priority.

Urban regions are recognised as driving forces of the global economy as well as the main sources of social inequality. In recent decades, particularly, housing access has become a serious problem, not only for the most disadvantaged population, but also for the middle class, as a result of economic crises and despite of prices decline in the housing market. In urban regions with high population density, some social groups face problems of housing affordability that depend not only on market prices but also on income availability. The contribution proposes a methodology for income-threshold assessment through a combination between the ratio income and the residual income approaches, which is applied to two different Sicilian urban regions: the urban region of Palermo (UR PA) and the urban region of Syracuse and Ragusa (UR SR-RG). A focus on low-income levels in high residential tension municipalities helps to highlight the distribution of the housing access problem. The analysis can provide a cognitive support for developing strategies and planning tools or for implementing actions that are oriented to address the housing issue.

The European Green Deal proposes an epochal change in the European society by transforming environmental and climatic problems into opportunities and making sustainable and fair the European Union economic system. Radical changes will also concern urban redevelopment and energy efficiency measures in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve these objectives, rules and standards, as well as financial resources and assessment tools, are needed to support both urban planning and public decision process. This paper aims to analyze the existing European programs that are applied in some European smart cities, as they constitute a valuable source of information for the development of financial schemes and evaluation tools ad hoc for the Green Deal implementation. Moreover, the analysis of the pilot projects of the ZenN program has made possible to identify some critical issues regarding the economic feasibility of energy retrofit at a district scale, though further studies will be required to respond to the new assessment challenges launched by the Green Deal.

Nowadays, energy equalization is one of the many issues concerning the energy policies on the urban scale and in the perspective of reducing the Urban Heat Island effects (UHI-e). The different economic-financial profiles of the interventions implemented in the buildings having a wide range of climatic locations, typological arrangements, architectural-historical constraints, need to be coordinated within unitary local energy-environmental policies inspired by economic-financial as well as environmental issues. The renovation of existing hotels to achieve a nearly Zero-Energy performance is one of the goals of the 2050 EU’s energy policy. This paper presents the nZEB retrofit case of an existing historic hotel and proposes a step by step approach to nZEB performance with a perspective on the costs, in order to identify the most effective energy solutions. Such approach allows highlighting useful insights regarding energy and economic-financial strategies for achieving nZEB standards.

The phenomenon of the “houses for one Euro” is the epitome of the progressive and increasing abandonment of the inland territories in which many small towns are affected by continuous and unstoppable depopulation. This process, mostly affecting the southern and insular Italian regions, have been triggered by the quick industrial development started after the second post-war, led by the northern regions, that deeply and irreversibly modified the anthropography of the whole country until now. The impoverishment of a wide part of the Italian territory, is one of the many issues connected to the social-territorial justice that is the original topic by which appraisal and valuation, that is science of the economic value judgement, differs from other branches of the applied economics. With the prospect of an insight of the case of Calabria, the paper presents: as first some factual basic premises for defining the matters and the sense of the concept of land debt; as second some theoretical and methodological coordinates for reinterpreting “abandonment as a metaphor of being back”.

As many low-income households have still been facing the problem of affordable housing, in several countries governmental institutions have implemented various measures of housing policy and are supporting both the “right to housing” and the “right to buy” a dwelling at a subsidized price. Alienation of public housing is a political measure mostly directed towards low-income tenants, by which the dwellings are sold at a price set by law, assumed as a “administered” price. The gap between market and administered prices may be considered as the “value of solidarity” to be taken into account as the monetary reference of the social housing welfare policies aimed at reducing social inequities. The solidarity value approach has been implemented here to identify some measurements of the overall management efficiency (concerning the allocation of the public housing asset) and the social equity between the tenants whose “right to buy” should be fostered. The management efficiency concerns the ratio between the “administered price”, fixed according to the regulations in force, and the potential property market price; the social equity concerns the homogeneity of the prices registered over the actual transfers. The model is applied to a case study in the city of Palermo (southern Italy), where the Municipality implemented an ‘Alienation and Real Estate Development Plan’.

This paper aims to examine the theme of energy retrofit within the circumscribed field of refurbishment interventions on load-bearing masonry buildings built in the early 20th century. These include a remarkable share of the fabric of many European cities and, in particular, they can be found in geographical areas characterized by a Mediterranean (mild) climate. The main objective is to increase the climate resilience of the buildings by verifying the economic feasibility and the environmental sustainability of the interventions at the same time observing the specific architectural features of the buildings. We put forward alternative retrofit solutions carrying out synoptic comparisons of several technological solutions and types of materials, assisted by the use of digital tools such as BIM. In order to increase the environmental compatibility of the intervention, this article carries out a closer examination of the comparison between the employment of nanostructured, conventional – of synthetic origin –, and natural materials. The selection of the best intervention solution required the elaboration of an iterative flexible integrated process of assessment of energy, technological, economic, environmental and architectural aspects. The methodology we propose here is applied to the case study of Palazzo Utveggio (Palermo, Italy).

The issue of affordable housing has again become crucial in ensuring a greater social equity, increasing social cohesion and reducing inequalities within metropolitan or regional systems which, in the current climate of severe economic crisis, have to respond to global challenges of development, innovation and sustainability. This study aims at building a system of knowledge about the housing affordability on the territorial scale, by which to identify the local characteristics of housing problems that could be solved through traditional planning tools or new practices of social housing, which involves private stakeholders and/or public administrations. This system of knowledge should include the analysis of the wealth distribution both in terms of income and real estate market price, and the calculation of the income-thresholds (based on the HAI-Housing Affordability Index) that filter the access to the real estate market. All these data are used to define the correspondences between groups of people and affordable housings, distinguishing them both by income and urban location. This approach is applied to the case study of the territorial system of the Province of Syracuse (Italy) and it allows appraising the gap between housing prices and income level in different areas of seven towns. To know the size and the spatial distribution of these gaps is a valuable tool to orientate the housing policy, to select the best model of social housing and to design the equitable parameters of social housing projects for each town.

Archaeological sites are part of the history and identity of a community playing a strategic role on the different scales of the cultural and economic common life. Whereas on the one end the most famous archaeological sites attract huge flows of tourists and investment, on the other hand, many minor archaeological sites remain almost ignored and neglected. This study proposes a project-evaluation approach devoted to the &ldquo, minor&rdquo, archaeological site development, outlining a territorial, socio-economic, and landscape communication pattern aimed at creating an archaeological network integrating other cultural and natural resources. As such, these networks get able to match the demand of customers who shy away from iper-consumerist tourism and want to deepen their knowledge of a place. The proposed approach integrates knowledge, evaluation, and design in a multiscale pattern whose scope is to foster and extend the archaeological research program, involving public and private stake/stockholders to widen the cultural-contemplative experience and promote further educational events concerning the themes of the local identity. With reference to the archaeological basin of Tornamb&egrave, Italy, a Web-GIS knowledge system has been drawn to provide the territorial information requested by the economic-evaluation multiscale pattern implemented to verify the cost-effectiveness of the project. The expected negative results of the economic valuation supported the allocation pattern of the considerable investment costs, as well as the hypothetic scenarios about the evolution of the cultural-contemplative experience due to the extension of the archaeological estate. Some disciplinary remarks propose a heterodox approach for a further interpretation of the economic results and financial indexes, by introducing the monetary dimension of such a social capital asset.

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.

When urban and environmental transformations occur in areas where the equilibrium between nature and culture is complex and fragile, public ad-ministrations could decide to induce private investments using several tools, such as financial contributions to those projects of refurbishment that better re-spect the purpose of improving the environmental quality and of preserving the local architecture. Multicriteria models may support public decision process re-garding this issue, but it is essential to adopt a scientific paradigm that provides a major theoretical reference. This study proposes the development of a net-work model based on the scientific paradigm by Rizzo and the Analytic Net-work 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 is-lands, Italy) in order to grant public financial contributions.

An urban park provides many environmental and recreational facilities and services, and moreover it may become a catalyst for social energies and an instrument of community identification. This paper analyses whether participation and bottom-up planning may compensate institutional absences in implementation of urban parks, and how multiple criteria model may support socially shared decisions about their management. These issues are examined from the singular case of Parco Uditore in Palermo (Italy) that is located in a land which has been surprisingly undeveloped, despite the expansion of the city. The phases of promotion, planning and implementation of the park were the result of a synergistic but spontaneous collaboration of multiple actors, whereas an Analytic Network Process model has been built in the current management phase. The model has been provided for supporting a structured participatory process between promoters-managers and users for the selection of the best project among several alternatives, in order to strengthen the environmental, recreational and social role of the park.

Public housing policy has been proposing plans of public housing (PH) stock alienation or, as an alternative, property enhancement plans, since administrative and financial commitments have become too heavy for municipalities. This paper deals with one of the current public housing management policy initiatives, undertaken by the Municipality of Palermo (Italy), which aimed at transferring a significant part of the public housing asset to the current tenants, according to some terms and conditions, and applying a politically fixed price. This policy is described in general, focusing on the amount of the assets involved, reporting the terms and conditions for transferring them at an affordable price, and analysing their concentration/distribution in the urban areas. The main aim of the paper is to provide a valuation pattern for defining the trade-off between the efficiency and fairness of such a tool, recognising the conditions for the consistency between the transfer price established by municipality, the merit of the public housing asset, and the market value. A detailed study on two representative neighbourhoods was carried out in order to measure the value of solidarity of this policy and to propose some corrective rules.

Il multiculturalismo è una caratteristica della città post-industriale con la quale la pianificazione deve confrontarsi attraverso nuovi paradigmi. Il saggio illustra le analisi sperimentali condotte in un’area del centro storico di Palermo, al fine di valutare l’eventuale coinvolgimento dei migranti nei processi di gentrification, nel controverso panorama di politiche urbane di rigenerazione e di crisi economica e immobiliare. Alcune misure correttive delle politiche pubbliche sono individuate per tutelare il mix socio-culturale. Multiculturalism is a characteristic of the post-industrial city, which will challenge planning through new paradigms. The essay discusses the experimental analysis con- ducted in an area of the historic centre of Palermo, in order to assess the potential in- volvement of migrants in the processes of gentrification, within the controversial panorama of urban regeneration policies and of economic crisis and real estate. Some public policy corrective measures are identified to protect the socio-cultural mix.

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.

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.

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.

Agriculture is the major form of protection of local identities and sustainability and one of the most fragile Italian economic sectors, exposed to fluctuations of the financial/economic crisis. As a consequence, boosting agricultural policies should integrate conflicting objectives connected to preservation and innovation, effectiveness/efficiency, and landscape features and job opportunities. Referring to a large land area located in the central part of Sicily (Italy) the paper proposes an assessment/planning pattern aimed at providing some axiological items and a specific algorithm able to appraise each specific land parcel, generating different strategies and selecting the best format of funding allocation. The pattern combines some WebGIS tools helpful for spatial analysis and management of the big data amount coming from the Landscape Regional Plan and the cadastral vector database. The general approach integrates monetary and qualitative features, as well as land estate and landscape values within a multidimensional pattern providing the quantitative conditions for supporting qualitative and sustainable development.

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.

Multiculturalism is a characteristic of the post industrial city which will challenge planning through new paradigms, in fact the increasing of transnational flow of migrants reshapes the physical urban space and the socio-cultural relations, expressing new housing needs often neglected by planning and public policies. The essay discusses the experimental analysis conducted in an area of the historical centre of Palermo, where there is a high concentration of migrants in order to assess their potential involvement in the processes of residential gentrification, within the controversial panorama of urban regeneration policies, economic crisis and real estate market. The demographic dynamic, the real estate market and the use of public spaces in the historical centre are analysed to understand the effects of renewal policies on the migrants, among other vulnerable social groups. In particular, the concept of “Threshold-Income” is analysed as indicator of the families’ financial sustainability in order to verify the access to the housing market. Describing the case study of Palermo, this paper explores possible improvements in planning and urban policies to achieve social equity and socio-cultural mix by reducing the gap between household incomes and market prices, and to govern the processes of gentrification.