An Evidence-Based Business Model Applied to Urban Practice. The Case of Urban Void Regeneration

Understanding the processes that occur in the city of the 21st century is a complex task that involves different disciplines. A cross-scale interaction results from the urban tex- ture, environmental aspects and social traits leads to a complex network of feedback loops among urban features, local ecosystems, and human health that needs to be understood to enhance design strategies for the urban environment. The paper offers an understanding of how an evidence-based business model can be successfully applied to an urban regeneration project, along with environmental morphology tools. In this sense, urban morphology, mi- croclimatic analysis, and business model approaches are merged to explore how open and underused spaces in the city can be redesigned with a new set of assumptions, which suggests how the traditional design approach can create and deliver new values. The research offers a contribution to evaluating the cross-scale interaction of urban regeneration methods and the implication of an evidence-based business model approach in revitalising urban spaces. This approach is here described and tested to gain a richer perception of environmental aspects, urban patterns, and social interactions. The objective of this research is to explore the first application of a business model approach derived from business knowledge, that can act as a trigger in Environmental Urban Design. Operationally, this contribution focuses on the study of three regenerative solutions for an urban void in the city of Parma (IT).