Perceived quality of urban life in historic centers: a study concerning the city of Cagliari

In the framework of regional and urban planning processes of Sardinia, in the context of the RLP, established by the Decision of the Sardinian Regional Government (DSRG) no. 36/7 of 5 September 2006, the IPHCs are planning tools which implement the Planning implementation code (PIC) of the RLP into the “Areas characterized by historic settlements”. For these areas, the PIC defines a set of prescriptive rules and planning criteria (articles nn. 51-53 of the part of the PIC related to “Cultural and historic spatial framework”, which is defined by articles nn. 47-59). More precisely, article no. 52 identifies the IPHC as a plan which has to be necessarily approved through the cooperation of the Sardinian regional administration and a municipality as a necessary precondition for a municipality to exert its ruling power over the local transformation processes related to the municipal spatial jurisdiction, which implies a considerable pressure on the local administrators in order to implement valuable and effective planning processes concerning the municipal historic centers. As a consequence, in the planning processes of the IPHCs, heavily influenced by the control of the technical staff of the regional offices, a strong consistency and implied uniformity do show up as: i. a strong attention to historical, typological and morphological characteristics in terms of the territorial analysis of historic urban settlement systems, which are identified by the RLP as “Centers of antique and primary development”; ii. A strong prescriptive ruling framework characterized by a markedly-conservative attitude. It is therefore not surprising, given this context, that the Regional Landscape Plan of Sardinia (RLP), the first statutory landscape plan with regional dimensions produced in Italy under the new legislation, focused on the coastal zone because of the complexity of development conflicts arising from tourism (on which a large part of the economy of the island relies) and other development, and owing to the fact that thirteen out of the fourteen previous landscape plans covering coastal areas, which contained some restrictions on coastal development, had been quashed between 1998 and 2003. Following approval of the plan in 2006, restrictions and prohibitions (on development of land and on certain changes in land uses) stemming from the plan are currently in force, in order to protect a part of the island considered economically strategic and environmentally sensitive. Restrictions and prohibitions are set out by the plan by means of a system of rules. The planning activity of the regional administration of Sardinia has undergone a deep change after the approval of the RLP, which establishes the directions for nearly any future planning activity in Sardinia, and requires that actual sectoral and local plans, as well as plans for protected areas, be changed to comply with its directions. Within the framework of the provisions of the RLP, this paper analyzes the determinants of the perceived quality of the urban environment of the Cagliari’s inner-city through a survey addressed to the resident families administered through a questionnaire. The survey is interpreted through a discrete choice model whose results put in evidence several important inferences related to residential satisfaction. These inferences could be very helpful for the definition of future public policies for the substantial improvement of the quality of life of historic centers, related to public services and infrastructure endowment, for example public parking, refuse collection and retail shops.