Urban areas and regional contexts are at the core of social, spatial, economic and institutional questions. These challenges include, just to name a few: housing affordability, sustainable development, climate mitigation and adaptation, social inclusion, spatial polarization and governance of functional regions.
Evidence-based decision making can significantly support the effectiveness in regulation of these complex and overlapping issues, making systematic knowledge and evaluation of development programs a strategic asset.
We offer evaluations and follow-up consulting services for development projects in cities and regions. Using evaluation in urban and regional development processes enables stakeholders to better understand and improve implementation processes, results and impacts. We address public bodies, private developers, and citizen organisations alike. We work across the hierarchy of planning rules and combine urbanistic and architectural planning with the assessment of adopted policy instruments.
Our team mixes expertise in urban governance processes and spatial development with evaluation know-how. Evaluating and advising development projects in cities and regions means for us to intensively interact with project shareholders and stakeholders, identify written and unwritten expectations, compare them with the results achieved, highlight unforeseen outcomes, and formulate recommendations for further courses of actions.
Evaluation criteria and success factors of development projects are diverse and can range from soft indicators such as the subjective perception of a neighbourhood to objectively measurable improved accessibility of green and blue spaces, reduced crime rates, changes in mobility patterns, reduced carrying-costs in real estate projects, a reduction of heat-islands and increased biodiversity across the city – to name just a few.
We base our work on a shared understanding of the object and objective of evaluation with the client and on participatory processes. Our experience shows that evaluations carried out in a cooperative and communicative environment yield outcomes which are both based on robust data and encourage collective and coordinated action for change.