Composite Indices for Urban Blight Assessment: A Decision Support Approach for Urban Regeneration

Urban regeneration policies require operational tools capable of iden-tifying priority areas, justifying investment choices, and monitoring change over time. In this context, urban blight can be understood as a multidimensional and context-dependent phenomenon, shaped by combinations of physical deteriora-tion, socio-economic vulnerability, functional decline, and perceived insecurity. This work proposes a methodological framework for assessing urban blight at the intra-urban scale in a comparative and spatially explicit way. The framework draws on established practices for composite index construction and structures urban blight into three interrelated components: physical–environmental, economic, and social. The procedure includes: (i) the construction of three component indices, one for each dimension, through a TOPSIS-based aggregation of weighted indica-tors; (ii) the synthesis of the component indices into an overall index by means of the arithmetic mean; and (iii) the spatial representation of results through thematic maps. Indicators are selected and harmonized from available data sources; weights are derived through an entropy-based method; robustness checks are performed to assess result stability; and GIS-based mapping supports the identification and communication of priority areas. The proposed framework is intended to support priority setting, monitoring, and communication in urban regeneration policies, while remaining transferable across different urban contexts, subject to data quality and zoning choices.