Free rooms for Sustainability in Urban Development: the Commodity Science perspective

Experiences of urban government have fully demonstrated that a major critical success factor of such local development initiatives is the presence of a governance system that has sufficient authority and time to plan, program and implement a policy for sustainable urban development. Commodity Science represents an integrated academic research area based on a cross-sector combination of techno-analytical backgrounds (chemistry, biology, engineering) with social science ones (economics and social). By this experience approach, we propose a model based on Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA), defining a set of criteria (goals) and their weights, oriented to analyse different alternatives to achieve the elimination of unacceptable, in order to choose the best within a default set of alternatives, for long term sustainable urban development. The proposed model allows to build a sustainability urban index to give “voice” to the different cores of urban system. Based on a shared knowledge, the method promotes a qualification path to achieve a common idea of sustainability. The strategic result is a new form of urban governance sustainable oriented, representative of “society’s metabolism”.