Rapidly growing cities and critical environmental issues: An evaluation model to support policy-making

The use of multi-criteria analysis methods as a decision support tool plays a crucial role in defining spatial policies oriented towards environmental quality enhancement, social and cultural development, and economic feasibility. In order to support sustainable city governance processes, purpose of this research is to define an innovative model for the selection of urban regeneration projects. Innovative elements concern both the sequence of calculation algorithms, based on a rational and repeatable hierarchical scheme, and the selection of criteria and corresponding evaluation indicators, to be referred specifically to the analysis of investments for rapidly growing cities with strong environmental issues.