The urban policies and territories live a period of profound transformation, characterized by a shift to new approaches and governance tools. The programmed public action generates an application for assessment: facing the loss of representation of the political and the increasing complexity of the variables that influence public choices, decision-makers have the absolute need for auxiliary tools to help optimize the use of resources and, at the same time, to make the decisional path shareable and transparent. The always fewer resources available, the importance of the time during transformation processes, the rational legitimacy of choices are some of the difficult issues to solve that lead to the need to experiment with new tools to support decision-makers, from the early stage of planning or in the pre-design phase (Saaty, 1990; 2008). In this valuation context of compatible functional solutions, the Multiple-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodologies (Roy & Bouyssou, 1993), and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in particular, play a significant role as they enable all the intrinsic values of the assets in question to be taken into account, both economic and extra-economic.

The use of these methods can provide choices that are not always based on the best cost-benefit ratio (Nesticò, Macchiaroli, & Pipolo, 2015). In addition to guaranteeing the presence and the clarification of different values, the formalization of an evaluation process carried out in these terms and the expression of the community needs also allow for the control and the correspondence between general and specific choices to take place. Since the asset is of a particular value, it is, however, necessary that the various criteria and weights taken on the basis of the evaluation be shared by the community or rather by direct users and by potential or future users.