Dominance-based rough set analysis for understanding the drivers of urban development agreements

The rise of neoliberalism in the context of urban development has en- couraged the cooperation between public and private parties. This co- operation is structured by contracts, generally called Urban Develop- ment Agreements (DAs). Being part of the urban regeneration strate- gies, these projects aim at achieving a durable improvement of an area according to sustainability principles. Thus, within the negotiation be- tween private and public, multiple and conflicting instances have to be faced case by case. Despite the uniqueness of each DA, it is possi- ble to define a set of pertinent characteristics that play a crucial role in determining the fairness and appropriateness of the public-private part- nership. Given this context, the work proposes the Dominance Rough Set Approach (DRSA) for exploring the relationship between condi- tion attributes or criteria and decision with the aim of supporting ne- gotiations on the basis of specific features of the DA under evaluation. Specifically, DRSA has been applied on a sample of DAs recently con- cluded in the Lombardy Region, and tested on the other sample of DAs under the negotiation phase. The analysis has accounted for the char- acteristics referring to the following five contexts: urban, institutional, negotiation, development, and economic. The inferred decision rules provide useful knowledge for supporting complex decision processes such as DAs.