Preface

The encounter between Appraisal and Valuation and other social sciences, such as Geography and Urban Planning, but also Philosophy and Psychology, can be considered as a valuable opportunity to combine approaches expressing different points of view on the same phenomena. The interpretative paradigms and opera-tional tools of Appraisal and Valuation are therefore questioned and should be re-vised to be adopted in the appraisal practice or to support decision-making pro-cesses related to real estate market and urban, territorial and environmental plan-ning, according to a perspective of social inclusion and multiculturalism.

Net Zero Energy District: norme, strumenti finanziari e modelli decisionali per la transizione energetica urbana

The European Green Deal: New Challenges for the Economic Feasibility of Energy Retrofit at District Scale

The European Green Deal proposes an epochal change in the European society by transforming environmental and climatic problems into opportunities and making sustainable and fair the European Union economic system. Radical changes will also concern urban redevelopment and energy efficiency measures in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve these objectives, rules and standards, as well as financial resources and assessment tools, are needed to support both urban planning and public decision process. This paper aims to analyze the existing European programs that are applied in some European smart cities, as they constitute a valuable source of information for the developm…

Energy Communities in urban areas: Comparison of energy strategy and economic feasibility in Italy and Spain

Energy communities using renewable energy sources directly contributes to reduction of climate-change gas emissions and energy consumption in the European Union. In addition, energy communities enable citizens to transform from (passive) consumers to prosumers (active consumers and producers) and to play a proactive role in the deployment of energy transition in urban areas. As the transposition of European rules about energy communities into the national laws of EU Member States is very articulated and differentiated, this study proposes a framework to analyze and compare regulatory and financial instruments. This framework is applied to the analysis of the case of Italy and Spain, as repr…

Scenarios of Climatic Resilience, Economic Feasibility and Environmental Sustainability for the Refurbishment of the Early 20th Century Buildings

This paper aims to examine the theme of energy retrofit within the circumscribed field of refurbishment interventions on load-bearing masonry buildings built in the early 20th century. These include a remarkable share of the fabric of many European cities and, in particular, they can be found in geographical areas characterized by a Mediterranean (mild) climate. The main objective is to increase the climate resilience of the buildings by verifying the economic feasibility and the environmental sustainability of the interventions at the same time observing the specific architectural features of the buildings. We put forward alternative retrofit solutions carrying out synoptic comparisons of …

Market Values and Socioeconomic Mixité in Palermo. The Role of Migrants in the Commercial Real Estate Market

Socioeconomic and functional mixité has been an objective placed at the basis of urban development to guide the transformation processes of urban areas, associating it with social inclusion as opposed to the morphological and spatial segregation, often caused by monofunctional zoning. The implementation of social mixité involves all social groups and, particularly, migrant communities that, in turn, are formed by groups with different cultures, nationalities, resources and income levels. The location choices of migrants and native residents produce an ever-changing urban geography of residential, commercial and service activities that directly impact on the real estate market. Migrants’ act…

Public and Private Economic Feasibility of Green Areas as a Passive Energy Measure: A Case Study in the Mediterranean City of Trapani in Southern Italy

Green infrastructure in urban environments provides a wide range of ecological, social, aesthetic, and health co-benefits. Urban plant covers in particular contribute to improved outdoor environmental conditions that, in turn, influence the energy behavior of buildings and their indoor thermo-hygrometric comfort performance. Within this context, this study illustrates a methodology aimed at verifying the economic feasibility of alternative types of green areas for public and private stakeholders, which are analyzed as passive energy measures. Therefore, our methodology integrates approaches from different disciplines and consists of a microclimatic analysis of different vegetation scenarios…

Smart city ed efficientamento energetico: opportunità e sfide dall’European Green Deal e dai programmi europei

L'efficienza energetica è diventata un argomento centrale nella pianificazione e nella gestione urbana a causa del cambiamento climatico globale e delle emergenze ambientali. L'articolo analizza i modelli e le procedure che sono stati testati nel gruppo MySmartCityProgram da diversi programmi europei che promuovono misure innovative di efficienza energetica a scala di quartiere. L'analisi dei casi studio del Programma ZenN, in particolare, ha evidenziato che struttura della proprietà, erogazione di fondi pubblici e disponibilità di finanziamenti bancari sono i principali fattori critici per raggiungere o ostacolare la fattibilità finanziaria. In vista delle fasi di implementazione del Green…

The Financial Costs in Energy Efficient District. Alternative Scenarios from the Demo Sites of the CITyFiED Program

The European Union’s environmental policies actively promote the transition to a low-carbon society and to sustainable energy systems that improve people’s quality of life and do not negatively impact the natural environment. To achieve these goals, the European Union funded several programs to pilot energy efficiency measures for buildings and districts and, lately, launched the European Green Deal. The results of these experimentations have shown that often the economic feasibility of retrofitting interventions is not achieved without public grants. This contribution aims to analyze the influence of financial parameters on the profitability of projects of energy efficient districts. The s…

Social Housing and Affordable Rent: The Effectiveness of Legal Thresholds of Rents in Two Italian Metropolitan Cities

Social housing is an instrument of housing policies to support those groups of people who are disadvantaged due to particular economic weaknesses and/or social relational fragility. Consequently, to achieve the objective of social sustainability, the rents of social housing must be below the market rents and low enough to be affordable. Italian law has set several rent thresholds which are based on local territorial agreements between landlords and renters associations. This article aims to examine whether these thresholds generate social fairness and housing affordability within each city and between different cities, or instead inequalities and spatial asymmetries. A cluster analysis is a…

The efficiency of the incentives for the public buildings’ energy retrofit. The case of the Italian Regions of the “Objective Convergence”

Gli obiettivi di riduzione del consumo energetico e delle emissioni di gas serra, enunciati in molte Direttive europee, hanno posto in risalto la necessità di promuovere interventi di miglioramento dell’efficienza energetica del patrimonio edilizio esistente. Le amministrazioni locali, in particolare, dovrebbero assumersi la responsabilità di diffondere la cultura ambientale anche effettuando interventi di retrofit negli edifici pubblici di loro proprietà, sulla base di diagnosi energetiche degli edifici, di proposte progettuali e di verifiche del raggiungimento della convenienza finanziaria, che può essere agevolata dall’erogazione di incentivi. L’Unione Province d’Italia (UPI) nel 2013, n…

Energy Equalization and the Case of the “nZEB Hotels”

Nowadays, energy equalization is one of the many issues concerning the energy policies on the urban scale and in the perspective of reducing the Urban Heat Island effects (UHI-e). The different economic-financial profiles of the interventions implemented in the buildings having a wide range of climatic locations, typological arrangements, architectural-historical constraints, need to be coordinated within unitary local energy-environmental policies inspired by economic-financial as well as environmental issues. The renovation of existing hotels to achieve a nearly Zero-Energy performance is one of the goals of the 2050 EU’s energy policy. This paper presents the nZEB retrofit case of an exi…