Supporting sustainable urban planning process based on scenarios development

The transition towards sustainable cities requires extensive improvement of environmental and energy consumption performances. However, the design of alternative sustainable scenarios is a complex issue which involves a large number of indicators and multiple stakeholders. In this regard, the use of appropriate assessment tools and decision-making models for addressing this issue are needed. This study aims at presenting research activities with a specific focus on the definition of policies and decision-making models to guide future transformations in the city, developing a “sustainable path”. The result is a new multi-criteria indicators-based system for supporting decision making at the city level. This includes the organization of a workshop in order to select the relevant indicators and to assign the stakeholders’ preferences using a multi-criteria method supported by SRF software. This approach is used in order to investigate the stakeholders’ perspectives on the impact of each indicator on the different future sustainable scenarios. Eight indicators have been selected, and accordingly, assessed through the collection of data for the “baseline” scenario. Next step will involve the definition of different forward-looking sustainable scenarios and the assessment of their impacts through the selected indicators. Finally, all the scenarios will be verified through a second interactive workshop as part of the sustainable urban planning process to choose the best scenario.