QualitàDellaVita Urbana e Politiche Pubbliche Urbane: proposta di uno strumento di aiuto alla decisione per l’analisi delle capacità urbane nello spazio

Cities and space matter for social justice, for it is more and more determined by spatial injustices. The attention on the spatial context, I argue, is inevitable for promoting social justice in general, since it may represent an important source of inequalities. If we want to deal with (in)justices, it is necessary to define which policies should be put in place and which citizens they should to address. It is needed, above all, to try to understand how the urban context relates to the individuals, how it supports or limits their development. The capability approach provides an useful theoretical framework for analysing this relation and for evaluating Urban “QualityOfLife”, not only for the measurement’s sake, but potentially also as a tool for evaluating urban and territorial policies, in terms of their effectiveness in increasing the capability sets of people. In this work I propose a decision-aiding tool grounded on the capability approach for the assessment of the (in)justices in space, in terms of the distribution of “urban capabilities”, which are those determined by the relations between the individuals and the distinctively urban and territorial features and phenomena. The tool is devised as an aid for urban planners in order to orient urban development policies and to increase the urban opportunity set, by analysing "urban handicaps”, which are “missing freedoms" in terms of spatial, urban and territorial factors limiting people's capabilities.