An Evaluation Model to Support Strategic Urban Planning in Italy: The Application of Community Impact Evaluation

Cities and their transformation have increasingly been placed at the center of the debate on how to reach a more sustainable and inclusive society. Indeed, urban planning is not seen any more as a technocratic top-down practice, but rather as a process able to summarize different perspectives on the development of cities. In this sense, public participation has been progressively seen as a fundamental practice in the attempt to democratize the process of defining the directions that such development should take, and to prioritize actions to be taken in the transformation of the territory. Such cooperative attempt would benefit from the use of formalized tools, in order to enhance the transparency of the process and to identify potential conflictual interests and priorities, and, thus promoting negotiation, also including those social groups usually excluded from the decision-making process. The present chapter proposes a methodological framework based on the integration of SWOT, and Stakeholder Analysis into a Community Impact Evaluation (CIE), in order to support Decision-Makers in the preliminary phases of the revision process of land use plans. Such methodology would allow to base the consultation process on a solid and shared informative framework, and to identify the different stakeholder potentially impacted by the outcomes of the implementation of the plan. Finally, the formalization of impacts and goals into matrices would allow to evaluate the potential outcomes that might affect the different stakeholders, and to monitor the effects that the induced transformations would have on them and on the public interests.