Smart Governance Models to Optimise Urban Planning Under Uncertainty by Decision Trees

In recent years, the applicative approach to smart governance in urban planning field has increasingly involved the decision-making processes of public administrations and has helped to solve economic, social and environmental challenges of cities. This approach has in fact allowed administrations to understand how changes are taking place in the territory and in real time, through big data, e-governance and city dashboards. However, the literature underlines the lack of decision-making models on which an agreement had been recognized for the organization and management of new projects on an urban scale. This need involves (1) understanding clearly the needs of all actors involved in a project (public or private financiers, public administration, control offices and stakeholders), (2) making optimal decisions w.r.t. the selected criteria, (3) providing a hedge against unexpected data changes. The main applicative goal is to have a full awareness of how much every single change means in economic, logistical and time lag terms. To this end, the authors investigate the viability of Decision Trees to support decision-making processes for urban planning.