Architectural Quality and the Housing Market: Values of the Late Twentieth Century Built Heritage

The assessment of the ‘quality’ of built heritage is a complex transdisciplinary issue, which both public administrations and real estate developers need to carefully consider when making any interventions. Recent international climate regulations underline that currently around 75% of buildings in the EU are not energy efficient. In Italy, those inefficient buildings are more than 50 years old and, if subjected to retrofit interventions, risk being totally transformed and losing their historical value in favor of a more contemporary use. This work aimed to study the residential heritage of the second half of the 20th century in the real estate market and to understand if, how, and in what measure the building and architectonical qualities are recognized and monetized by buyers. The city of Turin was chosen as a study area, and residential building qualities were analyzed using two quality indicators to perform a GWR on market POIs. The results highlighted that housing historical qualities are not homogeneously recognized by the real estate market, in favor of green ones. This work can help both public and private bodies to identify which ‘invisible’ quality residential buildings are immediately exploitable for enhancement strategies, with more respectful retrofitting interventions and a modern protection policy

20th century ¿invisible¿ heritage: qualities and values in the real estate market.

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

EPC Labels and Building Features: Spatial Implications over Housing Prices

The influence of building or dwelling energy performance on the real estate market dynamics and pricing processes is deeply explored, due to the fact that energy efficiency improvement is one of the fundamental reasons for retrofitting the existing housing stock. Nevertheless, the joint effect produced by the building energy performance and the architectural, typological, and physical-technical attributes seems poorly studied. Thus, the aim of this work is to investigate the influence of both energy performance and diverse features on property prices, by performing spatial analyses on a sample of housing properties listed on Turin’s real estate market and on different sub-samples. In particular, Exploratory Spatial Data Analyses (ESDA) statistics, standard hedonic price models (Ordinary Least Squares—OLS) and Spatial Error Models (SEM) are firstly applied on the whole data sample, and then on three different sub-samples: two territorial clusters and a sub-sample representative of the most energy inefficient buildings constructed between 1946 and 1990. Results demonstrate that Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) labels are gaining power in influencing price variations, contrary to the empirical evidence that emerged in some previous studies. Furthermore, the presence of the spatial effects reveals that the impact of energy attributes changes in different sub-markets and thus has to be spatially analysed

Urban Vibrancy: An Emerging Factor that Spatially Influences the Real Estate Market

Urban vibrancy is defined and measured differently in the literature. Originally, it was described as the number of people in and around streets or neighborhoods. Now, it is commonly associated with activity intensity, the diversity of land-use configurations, and the accessibility of a place. The aim of this paper is to study urban vibrancy, its relationship with neighborhood services, and the real estate market. Firstly, it is used a set of neighborhood service variables, and a Principal Component Analysis is performed in order to create a Neighborhood Services Index (NeSI) that is able to identify the most and least vibrant urban areas of a city. Secondly, the influence of urban vibrancy on the listing prices of existing housing is analyzed by performing spatial analyses. To achieve this, the presence of spatial autocorrelation is investigated and spatial clusters are identified. Therefore, spatial autoregressive models are applied to manage spatial effects and to identify the variables that significantly influence the process of housing price determination. The results confirm that housing prices are spatially autocorrelated and highlight that housing prices and NeSI are statistically associated with each other. The identification of the urban areas characterized by different levels of vibrancy and housing prices can effectively support the revision of the urban development plan and its regulatory act, as well as strategic urban policies and actions. Such data analyses support a deep knowledge of the current status quo, which is necessary to drive important changes to develop more effcient, sustainable, and competitive cities

Assessing Social and Territorial Vulnerability on Real Estate Submarkets

The concept of social vulnerability is widely studied in literature in order to identify particularly socially fragile sectors of the population. For this purpose, several studies have adopted indexes to measure the economic and social conditions of the population. The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between social and territorial vulnerability and the real estate market, by means of an exploratory analysis related to the possibility that spatial analyses can help to identify spatial latent components and variables in the process of price determination. A three phase approach is proposed, using the geographical segmentation of Turin and its related submarkets as a case study. After the identification and analysis of a set of three social and territorial vulnerability indicators, a traditional hedonic approach was applied to measure their influence on property listing prices. Subsequently, spatial analyses were investigated to focus on the spatial components of the indicators and property prices; their spatial autocorrelation was measured and the presence of spatial dependence was taken into account by applying a spatial regression. Results demonstrated that two indicators were spatially correlated with property prices and had a significant and negative influence on them. The proposed approach may help not only to identify the most vulnerable urban areas characterized by the lowest property prices, but also to support the future modification to the actual geographical segmentation of Turin

Location and real estate values: a study for the segmentation of the Microzones of Turin

The city of Turin is segmented in 40 cadastral Microzones, approved by the City Council in June 1999, which are set up as independent segments of the real estate market. Eighteen years have passed since the approval of the division of the city into homogeneous spatial segments, a period of time in which the pattern of the city has changed, both on the level of urban planning and due to the important changes in the real estate market, most notably the economic-financial crisis which has led to a steady decrease of prices from 2010 to date. Over the past few years, prior to upgrading the Microzones, the Turin Real Estate Market Observatory (TREMO) conducted a series of studies including the segmentation of the Microzones in Historical Territorial Units (HTU), identified on the basis of a historical-urban analysis of the area without questioning the boundaries of the Microzones. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the HTUs and to examine the contribution that a territorial unit smaller than the Microzone can give to the explanation of property prices, taking into account that when decreasing the territorial extension, one has to manage even less representative data samples. In order to study the explanatory capacity of the positional variable, together with a series of variables related to the features of the apartments and buildings in the price determination process, a hedonic model was applied by using a sample of housing units offered on the market during the four-year period 2013-2016. In particular, starting from the territorial segmentation of the Microzones in the HTUs, a traditional hedonic model was applied: in the first application, the Microzone positional variable was assumed, whereas in the second, the HTUs were adopted. Both applications generated significant results, with a high coefficient of determination (Adjusted R2) and an excellent explanatory capacity of the variables considered. The importance of the “location”, taken into consideration through the Microzones or through the HTUs, is historically recognized even at an international level and continues to be one of the most important features in the listing price determination process, even during the crisis period of the real estate market

An innovative methodological and operational approach to developing Management Plans for UNESCO World Heritage Sites: a Geographic Information System for “Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century”

The model for developing Management Plans for UNESCO World Heritage Sites drawn up by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities in 2005 is no longer wholly adequate in terms of promoting heritage resources and their local contexts. The article considers the innovation developed in the IT/ICT field and provides theoretical and methodological considerations, based on which a new methodology for devising Management Plans could be developed. A Geographic Information System (GIS) for the knowledge and management of the site “Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century”, is proposed as an innovative, dynamic, interoperable model that can both support urban-scale projects to capture the economic value of cultural heritage and promote forms of indirect enjoyment of the site

Economic and cultural value, urban and built heritage, architecture education: the active role of stakeholders

Innovation in architecture education is increasingly oriented towards the analysis of real problems considered in their multi-dimensionality and the active involvement of the stakeholders. In learning processes, it is useful to face real case studies so that students acquire disciplinary tools and technical knowledge for the definition of sustainable projects, closely linked to the territorial reality, the socio-economic context and the needs expressed by the different stakeholders involved. With an approach of students’ inclusion and involvement in the process of knowledge and definition of the problem under study, they are responsible for their project, collaborate with each other and with external stakeholders and become active in the community of reference. For the students this implies competences in engaging with stakeholders establishing consistent vocabularies, and facilitating participatory research and decision making in collaboration with experts from academia, industry, government, and civil society. Assuming these premises, the aim of this paper is to highlight how the active role of the stakeholders can improve the economic and cultural value of enhancement projects developed in Architecture and Planning Schools, focusing on the potentialities of the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) approach in addressing sustainable and effective design processes. For this purpose, a three steps methodology based on PBL approach is presented in order to facilitate the active involvement of the stakeholders in improving the economic and cultural value of complex building heritages at the architectural and urban scale, starting from real problems and developing sustainable and feasible projects. Each step of the proposed methodology was applied during the atelier “Heritage Preservation and Enhancement”, carried out at the Politecnico di Torino and implemented as a module within the Erasmus + EU project “Citylab. Engaging students with sustainable cities in Latin-America”, co-funded by the European Commission. Specific results were achieved for each step through the interaction among stakeholders, teachers and students and the application of evaluation tools. In particular, the steps and the related findings mainly regarded the context and the main problem definition, the knowledge acquisition and management and the development of feasible and sustainable projects. This experience highlighted the learner’s role in defining problems and alternative design solutions, focusing not so much on the intended result (project) as on the path to get there and so start the transformation from a project-based approach to a PBL one

LA VALUTAZIONE DELLE POTENZIALITÀ TERRITORIALI ATTRAVERSO UN APPROCCIO MULTIDIMENSIONALE PER LE AREE INTERNE

In Italy, fragile territories are often characterized by depopulation, degrade and minimal essential services; according to different definitions, they’re also called marginal areas, inland areas, peripheral areas and from 2013 inner areas. In recent years, a national policy funded 72 pilot cases to enhance territorial potential to resiliently counteract the demographic decline and the socio-economic weaknesses. With the aim of standardizing an evaluation methodology, the paper started from an in-depth literature review, highlighting that territorial vulnerability and vibrancy are never explored in non-urban contexts. In order to close this gap, authors propose a multidimensional methodological approach consisting of six-step-quantitative analyses based on specific dimensions and indicators. Shifting from the vulnerability approach, the use of different analytical and evaluation tools is suggested to explore territorial vibrancy as local development trigger. The results showed that the proposed approach can clearly support the territory exploration and lead to the development of enhancement policies in fragile areas as those analyzed in the context of the “Branding4Resilience” research project

An innovative methodological and operational approach to developing Management Plans for UNESCO World Heritage Sites: a Geographic Information System for “Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century”

The model for developing Management Plans for UNESCO World Heritage Sites drawn up by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities in 2005 is no longer wholly adequate in terms of promoting heritage resources and their local contexts. The article considers the innovation developed in the IT/ICT field and provides theoretical and methodological considerations, based on which a new methodology for devising Management Plans could be developed. A Geographic Information System (GIS) for the knowledge and management of the site “Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century”, is proposed as an innovative, dynamic, interoperable model that can both support urban-scale projects to capture the economic value of cultural heritage and promote forms of indirect enjoyment of the site