Sustainability, Vol. 12, Pages 732: An Operational Protocol for the Valorisation of Public Real Estate Assets in Italy (Sustainability)

The Italian Treasury Department reports that a quota of the country’s public real estate assets, with an estimated value of some 63 billion euros, consists of properties not directly utilised by the State Government and is therefore available for decommissioning alienation; in other words, for adaptive reuse. Numerous legislative initiatives dedicated to this issue over the past 30 years have produced very few comforting results. A plausible explanation for these shortcomings can be traced to the gap between established regulatory principles and the possibilities/capacities of local institutions to apply them. Put another way, legislation and indications, many of interest, have not been supported by adequate economic, structural, and organisational resources. The underlying question is, what is the structure of the decision-making process behind the sale or redevelopment of real estate assets? Beginning with these premises, this paper proposes an operational Business Process Modelling protocol that develops three different indexes—urban values index (Ivu), use index (Iut), and technical-maintenance index (Itm)—which may suggest three hypothetical scenarios of valorisation and three lines of action. A test of this model using a selection of public buildings owned by the City of Pescara showed it to be prognostic of some of the choices subsequently made by the municipal administration.