The research addresses the economic sustainability of real estate investments, realised through urban densification process. The aim of this work is to verify whether urban form, and diverse high density urban forms specifically, must be taken into account in investments valuations of urban regeneration and urban renewal projects, such as all the other features (i.e. costs, profits, risk) usually part of the valuation process.
The research question and the context from which emerges it are presented in the introduction. Subsequently, the two main lines of research are summarised: the first one concerns investments feasibility at project scale; the latter at urban and territorial level.
Each one of the following three chapters are paper – based and discuss a specific research issues. The first one describes the relevance of building typology for the success or the failure of high density urban developments. The next one tests the phenomena interpretations, discussed in the previous chapter, with a real option theoretical model. The purpose is to verify the potential option value of sequential investments, using both of the main high density building typology: high rise - tall building and low rise - blocks developments.
The last chapter presents the results of a multivariate regression, designed on an original dataset, which verify whether a relationship between urban density and residential market trends actually exists.
Finally, the conclusion summarises the research results and suggests further research features on this matter