Framework for C40 Reinventing Cities: Integrating Assessment, Planning, and Design for the Urban Regeneration of Bologna's Prati-Ravone District

The urban ecosystem is highly dependent on external inputs of matter and energy as well as internal balance led by social interactions and community synergies. All of this highlights how, firstly, potentially vulnerable the system is and, secondly, how complex it is, thus how needy is to enlarge our point of view to archive a holistic urban development process. Recognizing the imponderability of some factors and the existence of often non-linear relationships among the components of a system as a spatial system may be, it is easy to understand why in this research the idea is to bring as evaluation tool of Multicriteria Analysis for spatial planning. The thesis questions the potential of applying integrated assessment techniques to urban-scale regeneration projects. The pilot case is the Prati di Caprara-Ravone neighbourhood of Bologna, where the urban challenge is to recover an area marked by many difficulties due to the lack of infrastructure and community, but which at the same time presents opportunities due to its strategic location and green areas. The volume of data derived from the analysis is then transposed into an Analytic Network Process system, highlighting how datas, even of different nature and scales, influence and interface with the overall regeneration problem. One of the final products of the research is finally to incorporate the preferences found among the system's actions into a framework that could lead to new urban plan. This example of integrated multidisciplinary evaluation, which in fact includes political and bureaucratic considerations, environmental analysis, social and behavioural analysis, as well as technical and construction-related, not forgetting to economic impact and the evolution of the project over time and in its different alternatives, is to be considered as a case study for a future systematic integration of this type of data management within administrations and large-scale projects