Measuring the Potential for Sustainable Densification at the Urban Scale: An Application in the Emilia-Romagna Region

Even if urban densification generally represents a multidimensional strategy to promote more efficient land use, driving such processes in urban environments needs great attention from planners and decision-makers to ensure efficient, livable, and sustainable urban systems. Starting from these assumptions, this paper presents a novel urban planning tool for measuring and mapping the sustainable densification potential of urban areas. The potential for sustainable densification is assessed through a spatial multi-criteria analysis performed at the census tract level considering 13 variables related to five living environment dimensions: socioeconomic profile, urban morphology, mixed-land use, urban green areas, and transportation and mobility. A municipality within the Emilia-Romagna region, Carpi, is selected as a case study to experiment with and validate the methodology. Following the proposed approach, the authors created a map of the sustainable densification potential of the case study at the urban scale, considering the increase in housing and uses and functions. The results show the case study's realistic potential for such densification interventions, which is generally low in both cases. The proposed method represents a valuable operational decision support system for planners and decision-makers to measure and spatially explicitly identify urban areas' potential for sustainable densification interventions. Further development of this research can improve the proposed method and develop a powerful decision support tool for urban planners and policymakers to evaluate sustainable densification interventions on a deeper scale and scope.