Weighting Procedures and Environmental Sustainability Assessment: An Experiment Based on an Urban Regeneration Programme in Northern Italy

Urban projects, plans, and programs are subject to specific valuation procedures, which have the objective of assessing the sustainability of the proposed strategies. In this domain, Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) provides a wide set of methods for sustainability assessment, by comparing alternative projects or criteria on heterogeneous measurement scales. A crucial step in the application of MCDA methodologies to real-world problems concerns the assessment of criteria relative importance and in turn the degree of preference attaining different alternatives, due to behavioral issues which can affect final results. This paper illustrates an experimental protocol developed in the context of the evaluation of an urban regeneration program in Northern Italy. In the experiment, a group of five experts and stakeholders were asked to weigh a set of multidimensional attributes according to three different weighting procedures, namely the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the SWING method, and the SMARTER method. The paper discusses the results obtained in the set of weights, pointing out differences as well as similarities and discussing the pros and cons of the three different weighting procedures.