Fostering New Value Chains and Social Impact-Oriented Strategies in Urban Regeneration Processes: What Challenges for the Evaluation Discipline?

Urban regeneration processes represent a key element for contemporary cities aiming to pursue sustainable development strategies; however, the challenges set by present socio-economic conditions require that smart and novel solutions able to effectively achieve urban regeneration goals (e.g. enhancement of inhabitants’ quality of life through actions on buildings and the urban environment, improvement of housing conditions, reduction of spatial social inequalities, etc.) be conceived. In this context, new approaches leveraging on the social innovation framework and aiming to generate a positive social impact are progressively emerging, facilitating not only the achievement of pre-defined goals but also the generation of new value chains that still need to be fully explored and evaluated. Given this framework, in this paper we firstly present the relationships occurring between urban regeneration, social innovation, social impact and values, underlying the increasing role of stakeholder engagement and of new investment paradigms. Secondly, we summarize the main evaluation approaches that have been applied so far to the description and measurement of social impact, then proposing a preliminary classification of the frameworks used to evaluate innovative urban initiatives and social impact-oriented investments. Thirdly, we advance that social-impact oriented initiatives entail further components of value that have not been generally taken into account into traditional urban regeneration approaches, then proposing an original definition of this concept of value. Finally, we suggest that the new value chains that are generated by innovative and social impact-oriented urban regeneration initiatives require the development of evaluation approaches able to capture these specific components of value.