Composite Index to Evaluate Urban Settlements Efficiency. An Application to the Territorial Context of Baronissi Municipality

The growing ecological awareness in recent years has led to the widespread adoption of various protocols that allow for the certification of the sustainability of a building or a district. However, comprehensive tools for the multidimensional evaluation of urban planning projects on an urban scale are not yet available. The paper goal is to provide the urban planning process with tools for designing livable and inclusive settlements, in line with sustainable develop-ment goals. The focus is on the urban settlement, which can be identified as a neighborhood or an urban area that is the subject of a neighborhood plan, in an attempt to lead the debate to an operational scale and to reflect on the contents of the plan on a detailed scale. This paper proposes a novel Urban Settlements Efficiency Evaluation Methodology which includes a multicriteria solution TOP-SIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) based to rank a set of settlements according to their efficiency level. The model uses a sys-tem of indicators specifically built from a broad survey of scientific articles and international experience. More than fifteen quantitative and qualitative criteria are proposed as the basis for evaluation. This methodology led us to the definition and calculation of the composite settlement efficiency index (ISE).