Sustainability assessment of urban areas through a multicriteria decision support system

The paper presents a new system of indicators for assessing urban sustainability that can be embodied in a simple decision support system (DSS). The development of this system is based on a multidisciplinary approach in which previous experiences in producing decision and rating tools for sustainable building policies are merged with the analytical tools of environmental economics and urban economics. The main objective of this tool is to contribute to policy making in the framework of European strategies on urban sustainability. The hierarchical structure is organized into three levels: the first level is represented by thematic areas: (i) Environment; (ii) Urban Structure; (iii) Economy & Society, and (iv) Institutions. Each area includes categories and each category is made up of a set of indicators. The selection process and development of indicators are based on their relevance for sustainability analysis and the information they can provide to the policy makers. The metrics of the indicators are based on benchmarking in relation to performance of a set of cities representative of the Italian context. A baseline weighting of indicators is proposed by authors. The full version tool can be applied to the city as a whole. A reduced version, which can be applied to urban sub-area (e.g. neighbourhood or district), is also developed. An empirical application is carried out for the city of Milan, Italy.