A Selection of Sustainability Parameters for a Comprehensive Assessment of Urban Transformations

Urban planning is commonly recognized as strategic to tackle the global challenge of sustainable development. However, the implementation of sustainability in the urban practice is complex, and the existing tools in support of sustainable urban transformations are often incomplete and fragmented: e.g., the compliance with the land-use containment parameters, the ecological balance computation, and the economic and financial evaluation, are only partial regulation tools introduced at the local scale for ensuring an “adequate” sustainability character to land-development projects. Such a fragmentation of efforts is also traceable in the research approaches: a great variety of perspectives and diversity of domains animate the academic debates on the sustainability performance assessment. As a consequence, we wonder about the possible definition of new synthetic frameworks: a comprehensive protocol in support of the sustainability assessment of urban renewal scenarios, at the disposal of Public Administrations. Aware of the many and specific assessment frameworks traceable in the literature, we propose an attempt to analyse and select existing indicators, starting from the collection of those already investigated by scholars over the years (i.e., during the last two decades of the 21st century). Therefore, the analysis has been performed on an extensive database consisting of over 600 items.