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Migratory flows which characterized European cities over the last decade have generated profound changes in the social and economic tissue causing a housing demand with its own characteristics. In Italy, such phenomenon is particularly evident, not only in terms of property demand by foreigner residents, but also as to the turnover produced in terms of volume. Immigration in Genoa manifested itself starting from the second post-war period through a considerable flow of people coming from South of Italy regions looking for an occupation in many state industries and companies in the city or the port. The phenomenon ceased in the ‘70s with the beginning of the deindustrialization and it has been substituted by foreign immigration coming from North Africa and Central America poorest countries. New residents settle in the urban units of Molo, Maddalena and Prè (Historic Centre) abandoned by traditional inhabitants and where the lower prices level makes the buildings more accessible to this specific demand, often characterized by reduced economic capacities. I flussi migratori che caratterizzano le città europee in questi ultimi decenni hanno generato profondi cambiamenti nel tessuto sociale ed economico causando una domanda abitativa con propri caratteri. In Italia, il fenomeno è particolarmente evidente, sia in termini di domanda di immobili da parte di residenti stranieri sia in termini di volumi di affari prodotti. Per la città di Genova il fenomeno dell’immigrazione si manifesta a partire dal secondo dopoguerra con un consistente flusso di soggetti provenienti dalle regioni del sud Italia in cerca di occupazione nelle molte industrie e aziende statali presenti in città e nel porto. Il fenomeno cessa negli anni ‘70 con l’inizio della deindustrializzazione e viene sostituito dall’immigrazione estera dagli stati più poveri del nord Africa e del Centro America. I nuovi residenti si insediano nei sestrieri del Molo, della Maddalena e di Prè (Centro Storico della città) ormai abbandonati dagli abitanti tradizionali e dove il basso livello dei prezzi rende più accessibili gli immobili da parte di questa specifica domanda spesso caratterizzata da ridotte capacità economiche

Nei recenti processi di trasformazione urbana i margini di redditività per gli investitori si so-no ridotti e le decisioni di investimento devono trovare un equilibrio tra le istanze del sog-getto pubblico, che cerca di trarre il massimo vantaggio dalla trasformazione urbana in termini di servizi pubblici e il soggetto privato orientato alla massimizzazione dei profitti e alla riduzione del rischio. In questo senso, il caso del waterfront genovese costituisce un in-teressante caso di studio. .

In this study, the possibility of applying the Life Cycle Thinking approach to structural design, considering all aspects and phases of the structure’s life, is investigated. The idea is to develop a procedure for the analysis of the economic and environmental impacts of structures in their life cycle, including not only ordinary costs along life cycle phases but also the extraordinary costs resulting from damage and anticipated end-of-life caused by unexpected natural hazards. The building performance under extraordinary conditions is calculated according to a time-based Loss Assessment Analysis. Such analysis provides the probable performance of a building and its components over a given period of time, considering all the hazardous events that can occur in that period, the probability of occurrence of each event, and the related effects. The outlined approach is applied to a case study of a single-story steel office building located in Italy. Two LC scenarios, having a duration of 2 years and 50 years, are considered. Results show that contributions of environmental impacts and benefits related to end-of-life management and economic losses for natural hazards are significant and not negligible. It is highlighted that the greatest challenge faced when using such a comprehensive approach is represented by data availability and representativeness that deeply limits the possibility of its implementation.

The forecast of the most probable cost of an intervention in the construction or engineering field developed through a bill of quantities is one of the most critical operations of economic and technical planning [1, 2, 3, 4]. Regarding to public works, the recent legislation (Legislative Decree n. 50/2016) has introduced some changes relating the evaluation of costs; the paragraph 7 of article n. 23—which defines the three levels and contents of the design—establishes that the definitive project, in addition to the complete identification of the work and the elements necessary for the authorizations and approvals, must contain “the definitive quantification of the expenditure limit and the related time schedule, through the use, where existing, of the price lists prepared by the regions and autonomous provinces territorially competent”. The reference to regional prices for the estimate of the economic amount has the objective of establishing fair prices for the various operators (designers, construction companies etc.), at least within a territorial area representative of the economic and technological characteristics of the building sector. In many territorial areas, this entails the transition from provincial prices list to regional prices list, with evident difficulties especially for those areas characterized by specific productive and economic realities. In 2018 the Lombardy Region does not yet have a regional price list and only the provincial price lists (published by the local Chambers of Commerce) or that published by the Municipality of Milan were utilized. Precisely in relation to the new requests introduced by national legislation relating to the use of regional price lists for the estimation of public works, this contribution aims to analyze what are the differences in unitary prices for some of building works and verify the possibility of determining “concordance” indices to be considered in the elaboration of a regional price list able to take into account the different functions of formation of the costs (and therefore of the building works prices) of the workings between different provincial areas.

The feasibility of an urban regeneration project is the result of both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics. What deserves to be analyzed in this context, it is the role of the reclamation costs and the location of the site in influencing the success of the intervention. Given these premises, the convenience and the feasibility of an urban regeneration project seem to be the result of this formula even if there are other factors able to affect the final outcome. Nowadays the estimation of Ecosystem Services (ESs) is becoming a guide for the landscape design even if quantifying their benefits presents limits and criticalities. In this context the research proposed, presents an ecosystem perspective to estimate reclamation costs. The aim of the paper is to understand how to evaluate the compensation given by the provision of ESs in urban regeneration context when reclamation costs are necessary.

The growing diffusion of vertical green systems has led to the development of new systems and technological solutions which can improve the quality of urban environments. The present research evaluates the economic sustainability of a vertical greening system (VGS) installed on an office building in Genoa (Italy) through a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). The benefits deriving from the installation of VGS are compared with the costs. The economic benefits considered are related to the economic effects of energy savings (for air conditioning), with values deriving from field studies and monitoring activities, biomass production, estimated according to the material produced by annual maintenance works (pruning), and property value. The latter is estimated thanks to the involvement, by means of a specific survey, of real estate agents working in the city of Genoa. Results show that a VGS can be economically sustainable when a tax reduction on installation costs is considered; in this case, the Net Present Value and the Internal Rate of Return are positive and the Pay Back Period is lower than the life span of VGS. A relevant contribution is also determined by the energy saving for building summer conditioning due to the reduction of the external air temperature. A Monte Carlo simulation allows verifying the reliability of the results obtained for the economically sustainable scenarios. A Sensitivity Analysis on the main variables underlines the relevance of the design phase in order to optimize the choice of materials and technological solutions reducing installation and maintenance costs.

The conditions why processes of urban regeneration can be developed in modern-day cities have changed enormously over the last decade. Unlike the recent past, where the reuse for urban uses of former industrial areas was only based on maximising the amount of space, after the housing bubble begun in 2008, the profit margins for operators were reduced, and today, they faced to a sharp contraction in demand and a surplus of supply. Consequently, the framework within which we carry out the investment decisions is increasingly complex and is characterised by the opposition of a potential conflict between two forces. On the one hand, the public administration which seeks to take full advantage of the urban transformation processes to improve the quality of live for citizens; on the other, the private entity that has the aim of maximising the profits obtainable from the intervention and to the minimise business risk. Therefore, to ensure the overall feasibility of an intervention, urban viability must correspond to an economic and financial sustainability. The paper analyses the role of the economic evaluation in urban regeneration interventions through the analysis of a case study in the city of Genoa.

A wide replication of green envelopes can be a good opportunity to improve urban environment conditions, as demonstrated by several studies. Greening systems increase also building envelope performances; however their economic sustainability has not been fully investigated. This study evaluates the economic sustainability of two combined greening systems installed on an office building: a vertical greening system and a green roof, and it evaluates the advantages of economy of scope. The Cost-Benefit Analysis on two different combinations of vertical greening and green roofs considers personal benefits and costs over their life cycle. The results demonstrate the advantages of economy of scope, due to the additional benefits coming from the combination of two different systems. The results show that the tax incentives and the combination of green systems can make the installation and the maintenance costs economically sustainable during the life span of a greening system; this could lead to a wider diffusion of greening systems with higher environmental and aesthetic performances.

This paper presents an application of multi-criteria evaluation to select and weight property characteristics in order to estimate the most probable market value of a large public property portfolio. The methodology proposed, based on the involvement of key actors of the decision process, aim to support the decision process of value judg-ment in a more flexible way overcoming the difficulty presented by econometric model due to the scarcity of a large sample data. In particular the model proposed is referred to Adjustment grid method and multi-criteria analysis to reach a market value that reflect the intrinsic characteristic of the property assets and the market condition. The methodology proposed is tested on an interesting case study on the market value estimation of a large property portfolio owned by the Banca D’Italia. The application has shown that this type of procedures can be a reliable tool to ana-lyse the value creation functions within the real estate market segments and solve estimation problems concerning large real estate assets on which analytical estimates and regression models are hardly applicable.

Vertical greening systems (VGS) are taking much more importance in the last decade because of the different benefits they provide, not only environmentally or aesthetically but also economically by providing energy savings and materials protection at building scale, or increasing the building real estate value, due to the aesthetic contribution. Despite of this, because of the installation and maintenance associate costs, a careful evaluation of their economic sustainability will be essential for their diffusion on a large scale. This chapter relates to costs and benefits of VGS and the different estimation approaches for a careful prediction. Specifically, a sensitivity analysis of the costs and benefits of two types of green facades is presented in order to show the influence of different factors on the main economic sustainability indicator (net present value) and the importance of a reliable assessment of their values.

The main results of this paper will be the explanation of methods and contents of the experiences in Liguria aiming at converting a consolidated urban organism into a Smart City. Specific attention is paid to the experience in the municipalities of Savona and La Spezia. We can say that, similarly to what happened in the past years in many European and North American cities, the first projects related to the Smart City in Italy concern the possibility of introducing new technologies to make components of the urban system more efficient. In a second step, local institutions identified new technologies as one of the tools to develop new models of economic development and welfare. For some years in Italy, there has been a debate over the issue of the Smart City within research institutions, universities and leading companies in the sector of advanced technologies. This debate has highlighted both some of the most interesting experiences in Italy and the difficulty to develop a holistic approach to this complex issue. The ways in which regional, provincial, metropolitan and municipal administrations cooperate with companies in the ICT sector have changed considerably. Besides proposing technologically-advanced products for public administrations, these companies should undertake to work with universities and research centers in order to promote the growth of the economic system and of local employment through a holistic approach.

Friedrich Schumacher, a pioneer of so-called “sustainable development”, called for an evolution of economic thinking and a departure from laissez-faire’s materialism (Friedrich Schumacher (1911–1977) was a philosopher and an economist who strongly criticized materialism, capitalism and agnosticism. Religions fascinated him, in particular, Buddhism, although also Catholicism had considerably influenced his thoughts. He highlighted the similarities between his economic thinking and the papal encyclicals that have deal with economic issues, such as Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra. Keynes himself was fascinated by his theories, enough to recommend him for a position at the University of Oxford). According to these assumptions, a man, in order to achieve self-affirmation, must aim at satisfying his own needs through the fair use of resources. He has to shift the goal from the maximization of consumption and profit, typical of the traditional economy, to the achievement of people’s well-being. This theory shares many similarities with the introduction, in Bhutan, of the Gross National Happiness Index, which integrates the traditional Gross Domestic Product in the assessment of the country. When Bhutan is ranked only in accordance to the Gross Domestic Product, it underachieves; but when the Gross National Happiness Index is used, it reaches the highest positions on a global scale. Several institutional researches proposed other alternative indexes that assess the “well-being” of a nation, such as the UN’s Human Development Index (1990), the New Economic Foundation’s Happy Planet Index (2006) and the more recent Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report, drawn up in 2009 (AAVV in Human development report 2015—Work for human development, United Nations Development Programme, New York, 2015). Along with this willingness to change, this contribution starts with the acceptance of the inadequacy of the GPD index for the appraisal of “fairness”, in consistency with the famous quote stated by Kennedy in (Speech at Kansas University, 8 May 1968) “Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”; then it investigates the relationship that occurs between economics and religion, focusing on the content of Pope Francis’s encyclical “Laudato Si”. Finally, it proposes a resemantization of the paradigm of sustainability based on Pope Francis’ thought expressed in his encyclical “Laudato Si” for the valuation of interventions on buildings, infrastructures, cities and territories. This latter aims at reducing the large number of techniques developed by the scientific community to a more structured vision and, mostly, at translating them into a common language, in consistency with the content of the encyclical.

Over the past few years, mass appraisals have been the center of attention within the national and international real-estate valuation context. The reason for this growing interest is mainly due to the increasing relevance of real estate within the global economy and the need for assessment tools that can support asset management and enhancement strategies at a decision-making level. Many owners have expressed a need for such valuation tools: lending institutions, real estate funds, insurance companies, and managers of public assets (municipalities, etc.). Because of those new valuation needs and the difficulty involved in applying existing models, a new appraisal model is proposed here; a pluri-parametric one that would allow rapid assessment of a large real-estate portfolio in various real-estate market segments. The model was tested on three large real-estate portfolios: TQP property assets (Pension benefits of the staff of Bank of Italy): the Bank of Italy’s district in L’Aquila (Italy); and a portion of Piedmont’s ASL/ASO’s assets.

Since the late 80's, reclamation of former industrial sites has become one of the most debated issues, nationally and internationally. This is due to the presence of toxic and harmful substances in the soil and subsoil, and to the need to regain, functionally, those areas that represent “urban voids” within the cities.Negative effects generated by the presence of abandoned sites are essentially attributable to the increased amount of diseases (even serious ones) affecting the population who lives near those areas and to the related higher costs needed to ensure health care; to the costs (often public) for implementing measures finalized to secure those sites; to the revenue losses that the non-use of those areas determines for the public entity, and to the negative effects generated towards the development of other activities located nearby (Meyer, 2003). The expansion of the cities has incorporated these areas inside their structure; those became strategic also for the provision of public services such as green areas, parking lots, etc. The restoration of former industrial sites collides with some critical issues related to the uncertainty on the level of pollution and, therefore, to the consequent reclamation costs and to the time required for their approval, as well as to the uncertainty about who should be in charge of this operation. The valuation of the economic and financial feasibility thus becomes the tool that, not only allows identifying possible solutions for the recovery of former industrial sites, but also allows identifying risk factors that threaten the success of the operation.This work, after a presentation of the topic and an attempt to analyse parametrical costs for completed works, presents a case study of a former factory in Lentate sul Seveso, the “Tessitoria Schiatti”, now abandoned, on which a series of project has been developed within the Workshop of Architectural Project and Constructions held in Polytechnic of Milan11The Workshop has held by professors: Barbara Croce, Sara Cattaneo and Leopoldo Sdino.. Each work-group verified the economic and financial sustainability of its project through the application of a discounted cash-flow analysis (DCFA) model. All the models revealed that reclamation costs strongly affected the sustainability of those projects; those, in fact, cannot be paid entirely by the ones who develop the operation, but they need an external economic support in order to ensure the financial feasibility of the intervention.

Vertical greening systems can be used as a mean to improve the environmental conditions of dense urban areas. Several researches have proved the environmental benefits of green envelopes. It is still not clear if vertical greening systems are economically sustainable, differently several Life Cycle Cost Analysis and Cost–Benefit Analysis determined economic costs and benefits of green roofs. This paper presents a Cost–Benefit Analysis of different vertical greening systems – green facades and living wall systems – considering personal and social benefits and costs over their life cycle. Installation, maintenance, and disposal costs of each analysed system are compared with the related private and social benefits (increase of real estate value, savings for heating and air conditioning, cladding longevity, air quality improvement, etc.), determining three indicators: the Net Present Value (NPV), the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and the Pay Back Period (PBP). The CBA demonstrated that some of the vertical greening systems analysed are economically sustainable. Economic incentives (tax reduction) could reduce personal initial cost allowing a wider diffusion of greening systems to reduce environmental issues in dense urban areas, such as urban heat island phenomenon and air pollution.

Over the last decade, italian real estate market has been characterized by a steady decline in prices and demand; the phenomenon, conjunctural to a broader crisis of the european and world economy, has affected every intended use and localization, but especially the residential sector, where, at least in Italy, over 70% of all of the sales and leases are concentrated. When the market is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty about the future evolution of his prices and, consequently, about the risk on the use of the capital, the assessment of economic and financial sustainability of real estate projects, especially if characterized by a high public value, becomes crucial in order to operate the right investment choices. Interationally, the most widely used methodology for this assessment is the Discounted Cash Flow analysis (DCFA); this tool is based on the method of the discounted cash flows, namely on the discount of the balances between costs and revenues within the estimated duration of the investment. Both in public and private sectors, an intervention is considered sustainable when it is able to generate a total balance of the positive cash flows (Net Present Value) and an annual percentage of return (Internal Rate of Return - IRR), that are greater than the ones generated by alternative investments at low (or no) risk ( Prizzon, 1997 ). The correct estimate of the costs and revenues generated from an investment becomes a crucial phase for the purposes of a reliable calculation of sustainability indicators. The difficulties concerning the costs and their accurate valuation are essentially attributable to the level of the information that is available at the time of the drafting of the project and, consequently, to the chosen method of estimation (synthetic in the concept and the design phases, analytical in the final and executive stages). When the project deals with former industrial areas, characterized by the presence of pollutants in the soil or subsoil, at the previous difficulties it is added also the uncertainty related to the correct estimate of remediation costs; these costs can only be evaluated with sufficient reliability when all the analysis related to the type of those substances have been developed and when the procedures of the intervention are defined. In relation to these operating environments, this contribution is the result of the valuations of the economic and financial sustainability of some recovery and renovation's projects developed on the area of the former Tessitoria Schiatti, in Lentate sul Seveso (Italy) (that have) It has been carried out by the students of the Workshop in Architectural Project and Constructions of the Politecnico di Milano (proff. B. Croce, S. Cattaneo, L. Sdino). These results confirm that because of the major cost of the reclamation, the feasibility of every proposed project cannot prescind from a public financial contribution that will cover those higher costs.