Good practice:

ITACA Protocol Urban Scale

Starting from a set of basic assessment items, the ITACA Protocol Urban Scale aims to provide a final performance score, indicative of the sustainability level of the urban settlement. The constituent elements of the evaluation method can be summarized as follows:
- a set of evaluation items, called criteria;
- a set of quantities, called indicators, which allow to quantify the performance of the urban area in relation to each criteria. The criteria were distributed in a series of thematic areas that try to define the complexity of urban quality; governance; urban morphology; landscape integration; quality of the design (bld./site); public spaces; urban metabolism; biodiversity; adaptation; mobility / accessibility; social and functional diversity; economic-social effects.
The objective of this protocol, which will act in synergy with other protocols relating to building sustainability and facilitate appropriate responses to urban regeneration, is to provide a cross-scale assessment that will measure the sustainability level of interventions in urban environments ranging in size from the block to the city. This protocol will be useful for public planning bodies and all those stakeholders in developing or transforming urban areas. In order to implement its use also in support of financing programs at national level for urban regeneration, the Protocol has been simplified with the elaboration of a synthetic version.

Human Resources used to develop the Urban Scale Protocol total: 0.50 FTE (full-time equivalent) for each year of project development (March 2013- December 2016). Resources needed to implement and adjust the SU Protocol total approximately 0.20 FTE (May 2020-ongoing).

It is a reference for legislation, technical standards, application experience and the Italian way of building and planning, methodology for the performance classification of buildings and urban areas, based on a stable and certain parameterization criterion in measuring and enhancing sustainability for a rational and conscious choice. The latest syntetic version was approved on Dec 20 and is for free use. It was applied on a sample of 20 municipalities of various sizes of the Tuscany Region.

It is an instrument based on legislation and technical regulations on sustainable urban planning and points the utmost attention in compliance with the reference legislation. The main challange is to systematize the different technical and urban regulations to simplify the evaluation process.

This methodology has to affect all of designing levels at different scales, open to spatial planning policies and strategies.
This involves technical standardization, conformity assessment and accreditation and the definition of shared standards, the training of professionals able to influence the design process, the timely and objective verification of the results achieved, certification skills and accreditation of players.
It is necessary to promote updating, training and dissemination courses for professionals on these tools, with particular reference to public procurement.
The realization of such an ambitious process requires the full involvement of both national and territorial public bodies, as well as professionals, both in the scientific and research field, and private companies trades.
This methodology is easily replicable in different territorial contexts. The use of uniform evaluation criteria can be transferred in programming of public funding for urban regeneration.