Beatrice Mecca

Politecnico di Torino | polito · DIST - Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning

Is it possible to visualize in an immediate and powerful way the indicators that measure the sustainability of cities? While the final answer is rather positive, the process of getting there is quite complex and dense with difficulties as illustrated in this paper. The 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute a fundamenta...

The development of sustainable cities involves improving the performance of the built environment and its effects on its context as one of the multiple intervention points. Indeed, outlining and implementing building artefacts does not constitute a simple act of generating a physical place, but represents a process that cannot ignore the positive a...

Sustainability and the concept of sustainable development are currently adopted as a founding paradigm of global, national and regional development strategies. As such, they necessarily permeate new visions of urban development as well, leading to reflections of economic, environmental and social sustainability in urban planning and design practice...

Sustainable development of cities constitutes nowadays a worldwide goal. Therefore, the related urban and architectural choices must fulfil sustainable objectives. In this context, sustainability assessment presents itself as a key and fundamental element to guide decision‐making processes, orienting choices towards actions that make the built envi...

Within a global strategy for the pursuit of Sustainable Development, the governments are responsible for following, developing, and reviewing the 2030 Agenda at global, national, and regional levels. However, it is possible to observe a lack, acknowledged by the scientific debate, of effective implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)....

The concept of sustainable development is closely related to that of sustainability assessment, as it implies a process of evaluation of progress made over time. In this context, indicators present themselves as a key and fundamental element for measuring and evaluating the specific issues that compose the different phenomena to be monitored. Indee...

What has changed in the concept of resilient/sustainable cities and human settlements with Covid-19? When we talk about “adequate housing and basic service” today, do we have in mind the same housing and services we were thinking about before the pandemic? Nowadays, what indicators do we need to develop and monitor sustainable urban policies? The p...

The quality assessment of projects is becoming increasingly relevant in the estimative discipline, aiming at a greater control of the design effects of real estate interventions. If from an estimation point of view real estate development processes are traditionally linked to a concept of economic value creation, the current context requires reflec...

The paper shows how multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) tools can support the analyses of six hypotheses of adaptive reuse of an iconic historical building in Turin, Italy (called stock exchange) to identify the preferred alternative. In the last 2 years, the debate around the requalification of the building has been huge for several reasons:...

This paper explores the enhancement of adaptive reuse (AR) of buildings through the lens of the sustainability protocols within the context of circular economy (CE) in Italy. Cities and the built environment can play a key role in the transition to a CE, especially considering the documented negative global impact due to resource consumption and wa...

Reflecting on how economic evaluation is taught in architecture courses opens up a discussion between those who structure problems with design and those who structure problems with different approaches (specifically estimation approaches) and where this design and these methods can intersect and hybridise. The paper presents some reflections, and a...

One of the crucial issues of the contemporary city is the enormous heritage of unused buildings and areas. Their reuse can contribute to new social and economic profits, to create new values within society and to avoid the considerable waste generated by their demolition and reconstruction. To tackle this issue an approach of adaptive reuse is prop...

Sustainability is an inherent urban and architectural problem. It is simultaneously characterized by many different dimensions, pursuing heterogeneous and often conflicting objectives. To help address these complexities in a structured way, this paper illustrates an integrated assessment framework to tackle social sustainability, in order to suppor...

Our cities represent the crucial nodes of intervention to improve living conditions and promote sustainability.Therefore, the current pandemic, combined with the climate emergency, translates into an urban emergency.In light of the devastating effects of Covid-19 and the rethinking of the concept of sustainability, the goal of developing inclusive,...

In the recent decades, cities need to face new challenge in environmental, economic, social and cultural dimensions and the awareness of the necessity of significant intervention able to address these conditions, led to identify urban regeneration policies to tackle these problems in all their multidimensionality. Moreover, recently in this context...

The paper shows how Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) tools can support the analyses of six hypotheses of adaptive reuse of an iconic historical building in Turin, Italy (called Stock Exchange) to identify the preferred alternative. In the last two years, the debate around the requalification of the building has been huge for several reasons...

This research proposes an application of a MultiCriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) in the adaptive reuse framework, which is able to structure the complex decision process required for the effective reuse of an historic district. Nowadays, many cities are facing an economic, financial, social and urban decline. This is particularly true when thinkin...