Decision Support Tools for Urban Regeneration: Collaborative Approaches and Tools for the Evaluation of Equitable and Sustainable Wellbeing

Abstract

For decades, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was considered the main indicator for measuring the progress of nations. However, although GDP is useful for analysing economic growth, it is not sufficient to describe the real wellbeing of people and communities. Today, it is increasingly evident that the development of a territory has to consider also socio-cultural, environmental and relational dimensions, going beyond mere economic growth. In this perspective, the concept of Equitable and Sustainable Wellbeing (BES), developed by ISTAT in 2010, assesses people's quality of life through an articulated set of indicators, categorized into 12 domains, capable of representing the complexity of wellbeing.

In this context, the aim of the proposed research is to investigate the community's perceptions about the places it associates with conditions of 'wellbeing' and 'non-wellbeing' and the factors that most influence them. To this aim, starting from a literature analysis on existing approaches and tools for the assessment of wellbeing and from the outcomes of a participatory process involving the local community through surveys and focus groups, this study proposes a multidimensional evaluation framework (called P-BESq, the italian acronym for "Perception of Equitable and Sustainable Wellbeing in Neighbourhoods") consisting of 83 subjective/perceptual indicators to support the existing objective/quantitative ones for the assessment of the quality of life in cities on a neighbourhood scale from the community's point of view.

This framework provides an operational tool to integrate existing evaluation frameworks, based on objective/quantitative data, to support more inclusive urban transformation processes.