Caricamento in corso...
Economic evaluation of projects
01VOVWI, 01VOVPQ
A.A. 2025/26
Course Language
Inglese
Degree programme(s)
Master of science-level of the Bologna process in Architettura Costruzione Citta' - Torino
Course structure
| Teaching | Hours |
|---|---|
| Lezioni | 20 |
| Esercitazioni in aula | 40 |
Lecturers
| Teacher | Status | SSD | h.Les | h.Ex | h.Lab | h.Tut | Years teaching |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lombardi Patrizia | Professore Ordinario | CEAR-03/C | 20 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Co-lectures
Context
| SSD | CFU | Activities | Area context | ICAR/22 | 6 | B - Caratterizzanti | Discipline estimative per l'architettura e l'urbanistica |
|---|
2025/26
This course discusses the interdisciplinary process behind the complex judgments and calculations of values and costs from a comprehensive perspective. It is built upon the epistemological distinction between Valuation – an estimation of something's worth – versus Evaluation – an assessment, a summary of a certain situation.
Making assessments in our transforming world is becoming a priority, and holistic judgments far-sightedly merging economics, psychosocial and environmental aspects are becoming wise obligations.
After an introductory overview of various disciplines involved, a theoretical and practical methodologies toolkit is provided with a focus on urban applications and sustainability.
The course examines the economic evaluation of projects within urban regeneration decision-making, emphasizing the creation of sustainable communities aligned with the United Nations 2030 Agenda—particularly Sustainable Development Goals 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and 13 (Climate Action). It combines theoretical foundations with practical insights into key assessment and evaluation methods, including the Sustainable Neighborhood and Building assessment tool, to address complex challenges in urban sustainability for the built environment. Theoretical content is reinforced through workshops and interactive sessions in small student groups. Urban districts act as demonstrators and virtual laboratories, allowing students to visualize and assess the real-world impact of decision-making at both urban and district scales. Throughout the course, students develop the skills to evaluate projects by applying the complete decision-making process. The course provides a solid foundation in decision-making approaches related to energy and social transitions, with a special focus on public administration.
Knowledge:
You will acquire knowledge in the domains described in the course topics section. Specific attention will be dedicated to develop a multidisciplinary, although introductory, knowledge to face evaluations under the sustainability umbrella and at multiscale levels of analysis.
It will be promoted a type of deep understanding and replicability of concepts rather than a mnemonic learning. Autonomy in learning will also be emphasised, to provide self-directed learners, independent and confident, with a questioning spirit.
The course will be conducted in a way to offer learning outcomes enabling professional applications as well as academic-research oriented knowledge.
I use a “Systematic approach” which emphasises the outcomes to be achieved rather than the content to be imparted: a learner-centred approach rather than teacher knowledge-based.
It was Herbert George Wells who said: “You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.” This losing feeling, confusion, is what some students could feel when reaching the right dimension of something new just happened to their vision and learning experience. A “confusion” feeling might happen because the underlying schemata are changing: learning of a higher order.
This course will follow the constructivism approach according to which learning is not just adding, but changing information, a continuous amending of previous mental structures, an individual transformation.
A main learning goal of this course teaching method is also to help students reaching what Bigg (1999), in his cognitive learning domain list, calls “extended abstract”, the highest and most wanted learning goal happening when a coherent whole is conceptualised at a high level of abstraction and applied to new or wider contexts. When this happens, a breakthrough has been made and your way to think about the issue changes.
Abilities:
- to multidisciplinary link knowledge from different disciplines about evaluations;
- to assess the viability-sustainability of urban projects from a long-term and holistic perspective;
- to conduct/understand critical updated academic state-of-the-art;
- to merge academic knowledge with applications;
- to search, understand and create knowledge
At the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Link feasibility evaluation and decision-making processes and sustainable urban development to the paradigms of complexity and interdisciplinarity.
• Apply sustainable development strategies to real-world case studies.
• Analyze trade-offs and synergies among key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 7, 11, 12, and 13, through the lens of decision-making, using systems thinking and design thinking to deepen their understanding.
• Apply interdisciplinary methods to practical decision-making, utilizing measurable indicators (e.g., investment costs, payback period, air quality, energy use, green areas), along with design thinking and participatory approaches, to address urban sustainability challenges.
• Define and articulate sustainable urban development strategies through interactive workshops and case studies, integrating multicriteria decision-making, stakeholder engagement, and digital tools to evaluate and justify urban scenarios.
• Evaluate sustainability projects holistically and develop future scenarios to support informed decision-making, using structured methodologies such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).
The course does not consider any prerequisites.
The course does not consider any prerequisites.
The program of the course is articulated according to the following macro-themes:
- Landscape economic evaluations
- Sustainable land use investment projects - Integrated landscape investment projects
- Investments return
- Complexity
- Decision-making
- Multi-criteria analysis
- Valuations & evaluations
- Theories of values
- Evaluation methods & applications
- Monetary/non-monetary based techniques
- Economics/Psychosocial/Environmental evaluations of investments
- Case studies: international new urban developments’ evaluation
The program of the course is articulated according to the following macro-themes:
I. THEORIES | Sustainability Theories and Applications
- Sustainable development
Sustainable development, Agenda 2030 and SDGs interactions
Climate Change / Energy Transition
Circular economy
- Decision making under complexity and uncertainty
Decision Making Analysis
Wicked Problems – Inelegant solutions
Causality
- Methods / Approaches in Environmental Economics and Policy
Cost Benefit Analysis / Return on Investment
Willingness to Pay / Discrete Choice Experiments / Contingent Valuation
Ecosystem Services Valuation
- Participatory Methods and Foresight methods
Role of public participation.
Online foresight models, Expert Opinion / Delphi Model
Storytelling methods
Q-methodology
- Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Methods and GIS-based decision support systems
Multi attribute Utility/Value Theory
Multi Criteria Evaluation
Methods: AHP/ANP; Promethee, ELECTRE, Playing cards
II. PROJECT | Evaluation Methods
- Project cycle management, SWOT analysis, and stakeholder analysis
- Multi-criteria evaluation, indicator selection, and weighting
- Design thinking and participatory approaches for sustainable communities
- Systems thinking, co-design scenarios, and scenario analysis
- Interactive Spatial Decision Support Systems and GIS-based applications
- Feasibility Analysis, Economic evaluation tools, methods, and protocols
Previous students are required to follow the current year’s course content and topics for their examination.
Previous students are required to follow the current year’s course content and topics for their examination.
A number of workshops, individual/group presentations and exercises will regularly occur and be evaluated, together with a final assignment, for the final exam mark. The course will alternate theoretical lectures from the teacher and interactive discussions with students as well as student’s presentations of subjects voluntarily chosen or, if necessary, given.
I provide a succession of step by step notions but with a constant big picture view, often with analogies not that obvious or linear, with the ambition to stimulating students’ minds and a creative reasoning.
This course-teaching structure would try to accommodate a variety of student typologies that a usual classroom might have: activists (liking challenges, new experiences, excitement, freedom), reflectors (they need time, prefer structure and details), theorists (they like to stretch their intellects), pragmatists (practically based, immediately relevant learning activities).
It would stimulate a deep approach (understand and seek meanings, relate knowledge with experience, critically evaluating, full engagements with dominant themes and understanding of the contributing arguments) rather than superficial (parrot memorisation, fail to identify the dominant themes and underling arguments because of only aiming to remember the flat landscape of information and pass the exam).
Lectures are designed in a way to privilege to think, act, innovate, create. How to structure (recall, combine, synthesizes, extrapolate) info and use it (apply this info in an innovative and creative way). It will use a variation of teaching methods to involve various student attitudes and personalities, possibly stimulating interest, attention, participation and motivations, and it will have fair assessments accurately valuated.
A number of workshops, individual and group presentations and exercises will occur, plus a final assignment. The course will rhythmically alternate theoretical lectures from the teacher and interactive discussions with students as well as students presentations of subject voluntarily chosen.
Papers, bibliography, slides and notes will be shared in the portale della didattica and their relevant parts discussed in class.
An initial list of reading materials is the following:
• SALAT S., Cities and Forms: On Sustainable Urbanism, Editions Hermann, Paris, 2011.
BRANDON P.S., LOMBARDI P., Evaluating Sustainable Development in the Built Environment, II Edition, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken (USA) 2011
• Pearce, Atkinson, G. and Mourato, S. 2006, Cost–Benefit Analysis and the Environment: Recent Developments, Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development, Paris.
• COOP AFRICA, Project Design Manual. A Step-by-Step Tool to Support the Development of Cooperatives and Other Forms of Self-Help Organization, International Labour Organization, I.L.O., Genève, 2010, (web pdf)
• FIGUERIA J., GRECO S., EHRGOTT M. (eds), Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis. State of the Art, Springer, Berlin 2010
• H. Meadows «Thinking in Systems» (Italian: «Pensare per Sistemi») Published December 3rd 2008 by Chelsea Green Publishing
• Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., ... & Folke, C. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.
• Nilsson, M., Griggs, D., & Visbeck, M. (2016). Policy: map the interactions between Sustainable Development Goals. Nature News, 534(7607), 320.
• Pradhan, P., Costa, L., Rybski, D., Lucht, W., & Kropp, J. P. (2017). A systematic study of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) interactions. Earth's Future, 5(11), 1169-1179.
• Spangenberg, J. H. (2017). Hot air or comprehensive progress? A critical assessment of the SDGs. Sustainable Development, 25(4), 311-321.
• Reckien, D., Creutzig, F., Fernandez, B., Lwasa, S., Tovar-Restrepo, M., McEvoy, D., & Satterthwaite, D. (2017). Climate change, equity and the Sustainable Development Goals: an urban perspective. Environment and urbanization, 29(1), 159-182.
• Keeney R.L., Raiffa H., 1976, Decisions with multiple Objectives, Preferencesand Value Tradeoffs, John Wiley & Sons, New York
• Voogd H., 1983, Multicriteria evaluation for urban and regional planning, Pion, London
• Zeleney M. (1982), Multiple Criteria Decision Making, McGraw Hill, NY.
• T.Saaty, 1996, The Analytic Network Process: Decision Making with Dependence and Feedback, RWS Publications, 4922 Ellsworth Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, revision 2001.
• S. Torabi Moghadam, F. Abastante, C. Genta, O. Caldarice, P. Lombardi, G. Brunetta. (2023). How to support the low-carbon urban transition through interdisciplinary framework? An Italian case study, Planning, practice & research, 310-329, Taylor & Francis, https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2023.2177012
• Serge Salat, Françoise Labbe and Caroline Nowacki 2011. Cities and Forms. On Sustainable Urbanism, Hermann.
• Torabi Moghadam, S., Lombardi, P. (2019), An interactive multi-criteria spatial decision support system for energy retrofitting of building stocks using CommuntiyVIZ to support urban energy planning, Building and Environment, vol. 163, pp. 106-233. doi: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2019.106233
• World Economic Forum (2019), Making Affordable Housing a Reality in Cities, WEF Report. https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/making-affordable-housing-a-reality-in-cities.
• Maurizia Pignatelli; Sara Torabi Moghadam; Chiara Genta; Patrizia Lombardi (2023), Spatial decision support system for low-carbon sustainable cities development: An interactive storytelling dashboard for the city of Turin
Reports to be downloaded:
- Agenda 2030 – ONU (Download)
- “Global warming of 1.5°C” – IPCC (download)
- “European Green Deal” – European Commission (download)
- “Sustainable Development Report 2020” – SDSN (Download download)
- “Six transformations” – Sachs et al. (download)
- “Sustainable Development Report, Mediterranean Countries Edition 2019 – SDSN Mediterranean (download)
MOOCs
- Age of Sustainable Development (course link)
- Global Public Health (course link)
- Planetary boundaries (course link)
- Sustainable Food Systems: a Mediterranean Perspective” (course link)
Main websites:
http://unsdsn.org
http://asvis.it
https://www.die-gdi.de/uploads/media/BP_8.2016.pdf
http://www.citiesalliance.org/sites/citiesalliance.org/files/Opportunities%20for%20the%20New%20Urban%20Agenda.pdf
https://unhabitat.org/new-urban-agenda-and-the-sustainable-development-goals-to-human-rights-brochure/
https://isocarp.org/app/uploads/2016/09/Keynote_Watson.pdf
https://www.uclg.org/sites/default/files/roadmap_for_localizing_the_sdgs_0.pdf
http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/eau/28/1
https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/project/implementing-new-urban-agenda-and-sustainable-development-goals-comparative-urban
https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/project/pilot-project-test-potential-targets-and-indicators-urban-sustainable-development-goal
https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/sites/mistraurbanfutures.org/files/simon_et_al_2016_developing_and_testing_the_urban_sdg_targets_and_indicators_-_comparative_study_envir_urbanization_281.pdf
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17535069.2016.1275618
http://www.columbia.edu/~jk2002/publications/Klopp17.pdf
http://wuf9.org/
Slides; Strumenti di collaborazione tra studenti;
Lecture slides; Student collaboration tools;
Modalità di esame: Prova scritta (in aula); Prova orale obbligatoria; Elaborato progettuale in gruppo;
Exam: Written test; Compulsory oral exam; Group project;
...
Exam: individual essay + exercises delivery
Gli studenti e le studentesse con disabilità o con Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (DSA), oltre alla segnalazione tramite procedura informatizzata, sono invitati a comunicare anche direttamente al/la docente titolare dell'insegnamento, con un preavviso non inferiore ad una settimana dall'avvio della sessione d'esame, gli strumenti compensativi concordati con l'Unità Special Needs, al fine di permettere al/la docente la declinazione più idonea in riferimento alla specifica tipologia di esame.
Exam: Written test; Compulsory oral exam; Group project;
Written test; Compulsory oral exam; Group project.
The exam is devoted to understanding the acquired knowledge on the problem of decision making toward Urban Agenda and the SDGs. The assessment is expressed in 30/30 marks and the criteria guiding the evaluation are the following: a) comprehension of the topics; b) ability to present adequately the topic; c) ability to understand the implications on real world case study and the connections with other topics.
The exams are consisting of three parts as follows.
1) An individual written test. Students will have 30 min (about 2 min for each multiple choices question proposed) to complete the test. This test is proposed for checking students' progress in understanding sustainable development of main topics and issues. During the exam, students will not be allowed to use learning and reading materials. The weight of this written test is 30% of the total.
2) An oral exam is developed for everyone. Each student will be asked for 2 questions related to evaluation methodologies and approaches, including systems thinking approaches. The weight of this part is 30% of the total.
3) The presentation of a portfolio which includes all workshops results and classroom exercises is also mandatory. This will show applications of the methods and theories explained during the course. The weight of this written test is 40% of the total.
-Students must achieve a minimum score of 18 out of 30 on both exams to pass.
In addition to the message sent by the online system, students with disabilities or Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) are invited to directly inform the professor in charge of the course about the special arrangements for the exam that have been agreed with the Special Needs Unit. The professor has to be informed at least one week before the beginning of the examination session in order to provide students with the most suitable arrangements for each specific type of exam.