This paper experiments with some costs-benefit analyses, seeking a balance between soil-take and buildability due to land policy and management. The activities have been carried out inside the MITO lab (Lab for Multimedia Information for Territorial Objects) of the Polytechnic University of Bari. Reports have been produced about the Southern Italian Apulia Region, which is rich in farmland and coastline, often invaded by construction, with a severe loss of nature, a degradation of the soil, landscape, and ecosystem services. A methodological approach to the assessment of sustainability of urban expansion related, on one hand, to “plus values” deriving from the transformation of urban fringes and, on the other hand to the analysis of the transition of land-use, with the aim of “saving soil” against urban sprawl. The loss of natural and agricultural surfaces due to the expanding artificial lands is an unsustainable character of urban development, especially in the manner in which it was carried out in past decades. We try to assess how plus value can be considered “unearned”, and to understand if the “land value recapture” can compensate for the negative environmental effects of urban expansion. We measured the transition from farmlands and natural habitat to urbanization with the support of the use of some Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, in favor of a new artificial land cover in the region of Apulia, Southern Italy. Data have been collected at the regional scale and at the local level, producing information about land use change and increases of property values due to improvements, referring to the 258 municipalities of the region. Looking at the results of our measurements, we started an interpretation of the driving forces that favor the plus values due to the transition of land-use. Compensation, easements, recapture of plus value, and improvement are, nowadays in Italy, discussed as major land-policy tools for managing environmental and landscape preservation. The interplay between urban economics and environmentally sound regulations reveals some controversial issues in urban governance and nature preservation: perhaps some abstract regulations, conjoined with non-case-oriented urban policies, consider these keywords as the old chemists considered the Philosopher’s Stone. The analyses show criticality emerging themes in emblematic cases, studied in some municipal contexts.

In this research, the socio-economic determinants of housing market values have been examined, highlighting their respective contributions to the formation of the property prices and, in particular, verifying the property tax liability. The property tax is a factor that could determine, through modest fluctuations, the revival of the property demand, generating positive effects also on the construction sector, which has been currently affected by the negative real estate contingency. The functional correlations of housing prices with the main socio-economic variables considered (i.e., housing rents, household incomes, household consumptions, property taxes, population and mean population age) have been explained through an econometric analysis implemented with an innovative methodology that uses multi-objective genetic algorithms. The analysis is contextualized to the Apulia region in the South of Italy, and the population of the sample studied consists of 258 individuals, corresponding to the municipalities of the region. In particular, the data collected for each variable considered refer to two different moments, that is, the year 2011 and the year 2015, in order to take into account the fiscal tightening that has occurred in Italy in this period of time. The elaborations carried out have allowed us to enucleate interesting functional relationships between property prices and the explanatory variables considered.

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is a major policy evaluation tool, for institutional processes, when they need to cope with fundamental risks, give voice to non-human agents, manage commons, and address environmental justice. The interplay of SEA with planning, unravels key issues and criticalities in both urban governance and environmental democracy. How can evaluation be developed to support the process? Structured evaluation methods applied in environmental assessment are maybe not sufficient to solve complex social conflicts. We point out some key reflections with the aim of opening up the discussion, by taking the case study of the environmental assessment of pollutant activities in the main industrial port cities of Southern Italy. They represent, at the moment, the most significant social criticality in our country, related to the interplay between environmental assessment and risk for labor. The paper focuses on the case study by mentioning the evolution of some thoughts about the red stripe that links sustainability, environmental democracy, and social evaluation, and illustrates the issues of these aspects in the case study, with the aim of underlining the difficulty of environmental assessment tools as a major support for planning processes, when social conflicts arise.

The need for evaluation models capable of returning 'slender' and reliable mass appraisals of properties belonging to different market segments has been made mandatory by the events that are covering the global real estate finance, because of the emergence of non-performing loans in the banks' balance sheets. In Italy, the non-performing loans have been estimated by the Italian Banking Association equal to about 300 billion euro in 2014. In the present paper, three approaches of data-driven techniques (hedonic price model, artificial neural networks and evolutionary polynomial regression) have been applied to a sample of residential apartments recently sold in a district of the city of Bari (Italy), in order to test the respective performance for mass appraisals. The models obtained by the implementation of the three procedures have been compared in terms of statistical accuracy, empirical compliance of the results and complexity of the functional relationships.