Optimal Computing Budget Allocation for Urban Regeneration: An Unprecedented Match Between Economic/Extra-Economic Evaluations and Urban Planning

The path to creating livable cities passes through the transformation of underexploited urban areas and the revivification of neglected bits of urban fabrics within the contemporary and relevant theme of urban regeneration. However, this process is characterized by an operational misalignment between the urban administrative scale and the small scale of single neighborhoods. Due to their limited budget, public administrations refrain from attempting to perform capillary punctual regeneration interventions, as it would require higher economic investments. For this reason, local-scale actions often arise as bottom-up initiatives. These are sometimes effective, but their target context is hardly chosen by considering all the available possibilities through a higher-scale analysis. A solution to this issue can be obtained by selecting the most suitable actions to implement according to a criterion of effectiveness and impact: this offers the ground for original contamination of OCBA (Optimal Computing Budget Allocation) methods and tools by using them in the field of urban planning. These methodologies are most frequently used in business management to determine the best use of limited resources: transferring them to urban planning involves finding criteria and parameters to quantify the impact of urban actions and compare alternatives. This paper describes the early reflections and articulations of this research work through a literature review of OCBA methods and their parameters and a tentative outline of suitable criteria for urban planning.