Proposal for an Integrated Approach to Support Urban Sustainability: The COSIMA Method Applied to Eco-Districts

Cities represent the places with the greatest environmental and energy impacts in the world. Their transformation through a sustainable key would make possible reducing the pressures registered in these areas. According to the Sustainable Development Goals, attention has shifted more and more to the creation of sustainable and safe communities, characterized by low energy-consuming buildings due to smart heating and cooling systems, and sustainable transport solutions based on the use of private electric and hybrid vehicles. Besides the energy and environmental impacts, actions to tackle climate change provide the opportunity to create collateral benefits that can potentially generate economic and social improvement for the whole community. The co-benefits inclusion in the decision analysis is crucial to remove barriers and reveal the real potential of renovation projects at the urban/district scale. Following the guidelines of the European Commission, the tool used when evaluating public projects and policies is the Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA). One of the main limitations of the CBA method is the estimation of all positive and negative externalities in monetary value that can lead to imprecise assessment. To overcome this obstacle, a growing scientific literature on the application of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to assess the sustainability of investment at district scale is emerging. In this study, we propose a new assessment framework based on the COmpoSIte Modeling Assessment (COSIMA) to address the multidimensionality that characterizes the redevelopment process of eco-districts considering energy, environmental, economic and social evaluation criteria. The COSIMA method enables considering both the tangible and intangible aspects of the problem and the opinion of the various stakeholders involved in the decision-making process, which are crucial aspects in urban transformations.