Policy makers, urban planners and designers cherish urban quality of life as the ultimate object of their strivings. This reference to the urban quality of life is ubiquitous, be it explicit, implicit, or indirectly through a channel of some idea of justice.
Long may it remain so. Yet this raises several interrelated questions: What do we mean by “urban quality of life”? How can we measure it? What does it mean to improve it—and how can we do so in practice? These are, in the last instance, problems of operationalisation, but any such problem foremost needs a good theory. A theory good in general (what is urban quality of life?) and good in practice and locally, that is to say, a theory applicable and usable in the domain of action of practitioners.
Indeed, there is no consensus, and a variety of methodological and operational proposals exist on how to adapt, measure and employ the concept of the quality of life in the design and evaluation of urban projects and policies. This state of affairs comes as a surprise only if one is unaware of, or unable to decode, all the deep political implications unavoidably embedded in different options.
I will suggest that the capability approach provides a compelling theoretical framework for addressing these questions. But the claim is, so to say, more radical: I will argue that space and urban environment are an important constituent of some human capabilities. Among other dimensions of human capabilities (e.g. health, education, political participation, and so on), the way our cities and physical environment “function” – the way they are shaped, organised, and used by social practices – matters.
The adjective “urban” is here programmatic: in talking about urban capabilities, our point is not to “measure” overall capabilities of people who happen to live in cities. It is rather to establish how human capabilities are affected by the ways cities and urban environments function—through their design, organization, and social use. In other words, to make the term urban capabilities meaningful, in our research we explore to which extent we can at least partially isolate this specific relation between capabilities, space, urban environment and social practices of its use, and separate it from other determinants and dimensions of human capabilities.
In the talk I will present the results of several research projects and the tools developed in the form of evaluation models, GIS-centred tools, decision aiding systems for complex planning scenarios, including recent applications of deep learning techniques and IA-based algorithms. These applications contribute to the operationalisation and scaling-up of spatial assessments, enabling large-scale automated evaluations of urban capabilities across cities and metropolitan areas—all toward building a data-driven decision-support urban analytics platform.
The examples will present several applications in different domains (walkability, urban-greenery accessibility, territorial capital, social practices of use of public spaces) and across different scales (from regional, to metropolitan, to neighborhood levels).
