Inclusive and Democratic Methods for the Appraisal and the Evaluation of Urban Infrastructures

The implementation of urban infrastructures often generates conflicts between political administrative decision-makers and local communities, mainly caused by choices made by the institutions without an effective consideration of the general interest and will. Since urban infrastructures, for their condition of collective fruition, are to be considered as community goods, it is appropriate, in the choices that concern them, to take into account the preferences expressed by the community involved. To this end, in recent decades, in some countries, the direct involvement of citizens in decision making processes concerning public interventions has been consolidated by activating transparent forms of information, consultation, and dialogue actions aimed at obtaining full democratic legitimacy, sharing of the choice, social and political consensus. Such inclusive processes therefore assume a democratic value, as they ensure that all the subject involved have the right to expression and the ability to influence and determine public choice. As in other countries, a recent legislative decree also introduced in Italy the obligation of the public debate concerning projects of large-scale infrastructure. However, to achieve a shared and democratic choice of infrastructural interventions in urban areas, it would be advisable to go beyond the form of public debate, opting for the use of rational, fair and transparent evaluation approaches based on the active involvement of the community. To this end, the paper proposes innovative economic appraisal and evaluation techniques, to supplement the conventional ones, that include the individual citizens in a decision making process based on the theoretical principles of deliberative democracy. The proposed methodological process enable the members of the community involved, through an informed and discursive approach, to appraise in monetary form the economic value of the infrastructural good to be realized and to obtain a unitary and shared multi-criteria, non-monetary, judgment of choice of the alternative design hypotheses of intervention.