SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY AND URBAN REGENERATION PROCESS: A NAIADE APPLICATION FOR SOCIAL IMPACTS EVALUATION

Sustainable development is a widely used concept which is increasingly important in urban and territorial transformations. The concept of sustainability concerns the environmental, economic and social dimension and the aim of sustainable development is to find a balance between these. The social dimension of sustainability has been recognized to be the most ignored of the three dimensions. It has received increasing attention during the last few decades, also due to its involvement in the Sustainable Development Goals of the Urban Agenda 2030, which aims to create sustainable and inclusive communities. In this document, specific attention devoted to the quality of life of the inhabitants, supporting the valorisation of cultural resources, protecting the environment, bringing economic development and its policies and involving the local communities in the programmes to make the collective forces converge in the realization of shared efficient projects that responds to real needs of social classes. This paper focuses on the analysis of the social dimension in the context of urban transformation processes. In this paper six different urban regeneration strategies for the regeneration of an urban area locates in Northern Italy have been evaluated according to their social impacts on the stakeholders involved in the process. The paper proposes a multi- methodological approach based on the stakeholders and the NAIADE methodology. The stakeholder analysis has been used to identify the actors to be involved in the evaluation, whereas the NAIADE methodology has been used to select the preferable strategy by a multi-ranking approach. Through this method, the scenarios have been evaluated comparing and mediating the technical and the social ranking in order to consider also the stakeholder preferences. The final result is coherent with the initial purpose and it allows to demonstrate that the inclusion of the stakeholders is fundamental for the achievement of a consensus solution.