People and the City: Urban Fragility and the Real Estate-Scape in a Neighborhood of Catania, Italy

Abstract

Urban/social fragility is the main focus of most studies on civil economy involving the commitment of politics in the prospect of integrating and somehow guiding an ordered development of and ordered communities. The contemporary city is strongly influenced by the incommunicability between the social system and environment, the latter more and more, including urban and societal components. This study tries to outline a comparative social-urban profile of Picanello, a popular central neighborhood of Catania, in Sicily, Italy, characterized by the combination of different urban and social life-quality levels, thus expressing a heterogeneous vulnerability/resilience profile. The analysis is placed in the urban planning context and aims to: (1) Denotative a pattern that considers the different fragility/resilience descriptive indices; and (2) connotative a pattern of the human and urban dimensions of the social capital asset. This analysis was performed by implementing a multidimensional pattern allowing us to place the neighborhood in a ranking of the neighborhoods of Catania, thus highlighting strength and weakness under different respects. Furthermore, the monetary measurements of this vulnerability/resilience profile, was carried by means of the structured observation of the real estate market. Fuzzy k-medoids cluster analyses have been comparatively performed—showing and mapping the relationships between urban value density and real estate market prices tensions.