The challenge of the e-Agora metrics: the social construction of meaningful measurements

'How are we progressing towards achieving sustainable development in the EU's desired knowledge society?' Current lists of indicators, indices and assessment tools, which have been developed for measuring and displaying performance at different spatial levels, show that progress has been made. However, there are still a very large number of indicators, perhaps the majority, most specifically those which relate to social and political issues, that are difficult to capture. Issues such as intergenerational equity, aesthetics and governance come into this category. 'How is it possible to measure these and capture their full meaning and represent this back meaningfully to disparate groups of stakeholders in a society?' This paper will discuss these issues, highlighting the need for new methods and an alternative view of how to go about the capture and representation of the types of data with which we need to wor

Strategic Management Plan Evaluation of a River Basin District

Purpose: In strategic planning and management of environmental resources, traditional multicriteria analysis are usually adopted for evaluating alternative development scenarios against a set of criteria. However, the modeling of the problem is often inadequate to represent the complexity which characterized the decision. For overcoming this problem, this paper suggests the application of an advanced version of the Analytic Hierarchy Process: the Analytic Network Process (ANP). Methodology: The ANP is the first mathematical approach that makes possible to systematically deal with all kinds of dependencies and feedback among elements. It requires the identification of a network of clusters and nodes, as well as pair-wise comparison to establish relations within the network elements. The number of comparisons is dependent upon the number of interrelations among the elements. Findings: The method is applied to the Strategic Management Plan of River Po Basin, in Italy. The result obtained is a surprising ranking which places major weight to the cultural heritage and landscape rather than to traditional environmental categories, such as land and water. This result reflects the recent River Po Basin Authority strategy to institute an integrated and coordinated policy action in the field. Originality/value. The proposed approach has improved the integration of the strategic evaluation in the decision making process within the management of territorial development policies, thanks to a better representation of the interrelations among issues within the decision mode

Multi-criteria Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Energy Planning: An Interdisciplinary Integrated Methodological Approach

The present chapter provides an interdisciplinary integrated methodological framework. This framework guides to develop a multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) to support decision-making processes in urban energy planning (UEP) purposes. The MC-SDSS helps in evaluation and visualization of the results of different UEP scenarios involving the relative stakeholders and decision-makers (DMs) from the early stage of planning. This will help in defining and evaluating energy-saving scenarios taking into account the participation of stakeholders in an interactive way. The meaning of integrating different tools and methods in this framework is due to their complementarity in fulfilling various tasks in the UIEP process. This fact can help to assess, over a short-/long-term period, the mix of measures by analysing meaningful scenarios focused on energy consumptions, environmental impacts and economic and social aspects. The result is the development of a new MC-SDSS, which is an interactive energetic plug-in in GIS environment using CommunityViz. This tool has been applied to a demonstrator case study, related to a medium-sized city of the metropolitan area of Turin. However, the methodology used for delivering the tool can be applied to other contexts due to its flexibility

Implementing Circular Economy in Universities. Successful Practices at Politecnico di Torino (Italy)

The circular economy (CE) concept reported a growing interest as an operationalizing framework, able to support the implementation of sustainable production and consumption, resource use and waste prevention broader concepts. Even if CE is different from waste management, it has traditionally been associated with waste reduction, recycling improvement, and minimization of environmental impacts in cities and territories. Additionally, CE could be a driver for the achievement of multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On the other side, universities are recognized as key actors in the transition towards sustainable development at the territorial level. Given the use of CE as a possible change paradigm to decouple economic growth from associated environmental impacts, this paper aims at highlighting some of the main successful practices put forwards by an Italian university, Politecnico di Torino, in implementing CE principles.Keyword: Circular Economy, University Sustainability, waste managemen

Multi-criteria decision support system for urban energy group planning and decision-making activities

The choice among Urban Energy Planning (UEP) scenarios is broadly based on multi aspects. Hence, the Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) basing on stakeholders-oriented approach plays a fundamental role in implementing the effective strategies. In this regard, the use of proper supportive tools and methods to address the complex interactions of UEP purposes are needed. This study aims at presenting the final result activities of a national Smart City & Communities project, named “EEB-Zero Energy Buildings in Smart Urban Districts”, which is the development of a new Multi-Criteria Spatial Decision Support System (MC-SDSS) for UEP. This tool facilitates the group decisional processes for stakeholders by creating “what-if” questions and visualizing “ifthen” scenarios on-the-fly. Specifically, the study focuses on the definition of different energy retrofitting scenarios for the built environment, based on stakeholders’ preferences. Accordingly, different decision scenarios have been developed representing a set of retrofitting measures basing on the different hierarchy of preferences of the stakeholders as “stakeholders-oriented” scenario. The tool has been applied and tested to a demonstrator case-study, related to a medium-sized city of the metropolitan area of Turin

Il nodo delle competenze per supportare la transizione verso la sostenibilità del Paese

Lo sviluppo sostenibile richiede l’elaborazione di una coscienza etica, sociale e ambientale e la capacità di gestire i fenomeni nel quadro offerto dall’Agenda 2030 delle Nazioni Unite. Ciò pone la questione delle conoscenze e delle competenze necessarie ed è particolarmente critica perché in gioco non c’è solo il futuro dei sistemi territoriali e industriali, ma anche l’inclusione degli individui e la coesione sociale. Il presente articolo si propone di discutere criticamente l’attuale quadro delle competenze in Italia con riferimento alle sfide del futuro e alle principali direttive europee in materia. Evidenzia inoltre il ruolo del mondo accademico e delle università nel guidare la transizione verso una vita più sostenibile. Sustainable development requires the development of an ethical, social and environmental consciousness and the ability to manage the phenomena in the framework offered by the UN Agenda 2030. This poses the question of the necessary knowledge and skills and it is particularly critical because at stake are not only the future of territorial and industrial systems but also the inclusion of individuals and social cohesion. This paper aims at critically discussing the current skills framework in Italy with reference to the challenges of the future and the main European directives on the subject. It also highlights the role of academia and universities in driving the transition towards more sustainable living

Indicators and Scenarios for Sustainable Development at the Local Level

Cities around the world have faced the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented speed, due to our hyper-connected society. As history teaches us, epidemics plague society because of the vulnerabilities generated by humans through their relationships with the environment, with other species and with each other. The recent pandemic is a stark reminder that urbanization has changed the way people and communities live, work, and interact, and it is even more necessary than in the past to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to the development of systemic operational skills that can address complex issues within cities. This work showed how many measures adopted during the emergency have now become part of daily life. The lesson of the pandemic is that people’s health is connected to and dependent on the health of the planet, and cities are at the center of this relationship. The objective of the research starts from the need to identify a selection of post-COVID indicators providing an analysis methodology suitable for the creation of its own final set with the identification of specific key performance indicators (KPIs) of the project, replicable in other urban contexts, on which to base the analysis of the level of local sustainability, especially at the neighborhood scale. The proposed methodological framework is developed in two phases: (1) indicator selection and baseline scenario, set out to investigate the existing correlations between the urban environment and the neighborhood level of cities. On the basis of the assessment of the KPIs, selected on the basis of numerous comparisons with the project’s internal and external stakeholders, thanks to the creation of an interactive dashboard with Tableau software, it was possible to analyze the basic scenario of proximity at the neighborhood scale for the City of Turin, highlighting weak points and priority areas on which to act, experimenting with the theme “Inhabiting proximity” as an urban response to the pandemic