Urban design and public space regeneration interventions: Proposals for the development of an evaluation framework of the social impact

The methodological approaches, tooling and research results of the project "Social Impact of Urban Design for Sustainable Development of the City", provide the necessity to develop practices and techniques for the identification and monitoring of changes in the city's space , combining social and spatial data analysis. The paper aims to contribute to the discussion concerning the social view of  urban design interventions, through the exploitation of the results of the empirical exploration of the project. Thus, the subject of the work is to formulate proposals for the development of a framework  for assessing the social impact of urban design interventions. The proposals concern: (a) the promotion of the research dimension of the general framework of urban design; (b) the promotion of the ecological and cultural dimension of urban development through urban design; (c) the strengthening of spatial interventions processes through the institutionalization of urban design and the studying of social impact of urban design interventions, through the enrichment of the architectural competition process, and of the process to  investigate the necessity and prospects of urban interventions through public consultation, and (d) establishing procedures for monitoring of urban changes that aim to identify and assess the social impact of urban design interventions.