Objective
Problems to be solved
A major activity of public administrations is devoted to create facilities and supply services in order to provide a response to growing social demand for quality of life and to improve the competitiveness of cities. Despite the vast number of experiences performed there is a lack of objective knowledge about the results of building facilities and implementing new services, throughout the countries of the EU, and affecting particularly local administrations. As a result of that, there is an uncertainty on the achievement of objectives both in facilities in operation and when planning new facilities. In order to cover that shortcoming, the IANUS project provides urban managers with a tool to assess the overall satisfaction of public facilities in economic, functional, social and environmental terms. That tool helps to plan correction actions on current facilities, and to get a more accurate definition of new ones. The project provides the following value added to European Union policies: It helps to improve urban quality of life, as it includes the criteria of citizen and user satisfaction as a key indicator to evaluate public facilities. It improves competitiveness of the cities, helping them to provide citizens with more attractive facilities and services. It promotes a model of public investment that takes into account sustainability. It contributes to harmonise evaluation criteria among different administrations. It allows the establishment of systems for comparing the facilities of different countries using unified indicators. It allows, through comparison, the prediction of new demands manifested in other parts of Europe.
Scientific objectives and approach
The usual process of investment in public constructions takes into account only two steps: drawing up the project and carrying out the construction. The project proposes a new approach in which investment is considered as a global investment cycle, whose different stages include previous experiences in order to improve on them. That global investment cycle involves a promotion phase, a programming phase, drawing up the project, carrying out the works, an operational phase and the deconstruction. Interrelations between different stages and feedback from them allows to gather experience, and so to improve management. Within this approach, the project provides a tool for evaluating experiences at the operational stage of facilities, that allows covering shortcomings through next items: It provides a global method for the evaluation of facilities in functional, economical, user satisfaction and environmental terms. It provides objective data facilitating the decision-taking process on new public investments, and so helping to improve urban government. It provides a multidisciplinary point of view based on criteria supplied by public managers, technicians, citizens and service users. It provides a base of comparable items that can serve as a point of reference for evaluation. It provides a tool for the global analysis of facilities already in operation, allowing to plan correction actions.
Expected impacts
Prospects of the project include huge dissemination and exploitation plans to spread its use by public investors throughout the EU. Consequences expected from this are: a better quality of life of citizens, by building new equipment more accurately designed to fulfil their needs; better environmental criteria when building public constructions, getting a lower environmental impact, and more efficient and saving energy buildings; integration of social collectives with special needs by implementing criteria of design for all (elderly, children, disabled persons) through a friendly architecture; contribution to policies to fight the degradation of urban centres, regeneration of less favoured-areas and combating social exclusion by a better assessment of the actions required. This means that IANUS project will help to promote sustainable development, to make cities more competitive and to offer better services to its citizens.
Fields of science
Not validated
Not validated
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
08008 BARCELONA
Spain