What happens when a design competition for the transformation and recovery of two districts in a big town has no winner? The paper starts from a real case that happened in 2009 in Turin (Italy), when the City Council launched an ideas’ contest for an “unprecedented metamorphosis” of a portion of the City, to develop an analytical technique for evaluating an urban design competition. The methodology, which is based on Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Analytic Network Process (ANP), is proposed to help both the Public Administration to understand the main reason for the lack of a contest winner, and to help the designers to translate the announcement guidelines into design choices. The proposed procedure is applied ex-post to a strategic decision problem involving multiple criteria in project design, for which comprehensive decision support tools are very rarely used.