Historic Centers and Urban Quality: a Study Concerning Perceived Needs and Expectations

This paper proposes an econometric approach based on Discrete Choice Models to identify and analyze the residents’ needs and expectations concerning the spatial organization of the historic neighborhoods where they live, which provides inferences on residential satisfaction’s determinants. In this framework, determinants are grouped into three distinct categories as follows: i. level of satisfaction related to house; ii. neighborhood characteristics; iii. respondents’ social and demographic characteristics. The information coming from the implementation of the DCM-based analysis can be used as an important reference point for the definition of planning policies for historic centers’ preservation. In order to test and discuss its effectiveness, we use the model to analyze needs and expectations of the residents of the historic center of Cagliari, a medium-sized urban context of the Italian insular region of Sardinia