A cognitive/decision-making model of evaluation for ethical urban and building renewal

Creativity is a strategic factor not only in the production sector, but also for planning, development and management of the city. The physical shape of the city is determined by the plan of buildings and settlements as a whole. Nevertheless, the functional and aesthetical criteria alone are inadequate, if you adopt the view of sustainability. In particular, from biological, ecological and economic points of view, the shape of the sustainable city is the result of a process of creative choice of traditional and innovative forms, materials and technologies that contribute to the quality of buildings and urban ambient. This principle applies a fortiori in cities interested by not-negligible phenomena of immigration. In such a kind of cities heterogeneous cultures, values, lifestyles, housing and other needs are expressed and the question of the preservation of cultural identity of different ethnic groups is posed. In this contribution an economic-thermodynamic model is used to evaluate house building and renovation in a frontier urban context, subject to intense flows of migrants and place of life of people belonging to non autochthonous ethnic groups. The quality of life in cities is the result of a com¬plex integrated system of social, economic, environmental, institutional, aesthetical and ethical factors. Among these aspects, the energetic and environmental ones are stressed in a particular manner in EU and national policy. Political and ecological reasons feed the adoption of adequate architectonic and technological systems for non-renewable energy resource saving and for entropic impact limitation. This public demand is associated to the private need of more healthy urban habitat and interior places. In general, the community and private citizens require qualitative and quantitative performances that are substantial in order to achieve a good level of quality of life. The assessment model aims to provide information support to the choices of economic-energetic/entropic convenience at building level and on urban scale. It analyses relations among thermodynamic quality, indoor comfort and construction costs in the new construction or refurbishment. In particular some possibilities of using advanced technologies for the exploitation of renewable energy sources are examined. The evaluation is based on the theory of value as a result of the creative combination of energy and information at different neg-entropic levels. The model is specified for the typical application context.