Bridging Social Impact and Lifecycle Approaches for Sustainable Urban Regeneration: An Exploratory Case Study in Italy.

This study explores how integrating social impact assessment (SIA) with lifecycle thinking can enhance urban regeneration outcomes by managing diverse stakeholder interests. A case study of a factory redevelopment in Tuscany, Italy, applies a novel analytical framework to map social, economic, and environmental value across project phases, examining patterns in outcome creation and stakeholder influence. The framework introduces an original combination of Social Return on Investment (SROI), stakeholder salience, and temporal mapping, offering an integrated perspective on impact dynamics. Specifically, this research addresses three questions: how SIA methodologies contribute to stakeholder mediation in complex urban regeneration processes; what role timing plays in SIA effectiveness as conflict-mediation tools; and how lifecycle thinking integration enhances SIA effectiveness in urban regeneration projects. The study advances impact assessment with an integrated framework capturing complex social value dynamics and enhancing social sustainability in urban interventions. The analysis identifies 55 distinct outcome areas, revealing that employment outcomes dominate value creation (57%), while urban regeneration and viability (17%), sustainable community development (13%), economic growth (9%), and environmental outcomes (4%) contribute to a balanced multidimensional impact portfolio. Findings demonstrate that stakeholder salience evolves significantly across project phases, and proactive SIA application in early phases can reconcile divergent perspectives to maintain momentum. The integration of SIA with lifecycle assessment enables comprehensive understanding of how different value forms interact and evolve temporally. This approach is adaptable to different urban and territorial settings, making it relevant for practitioners and policymakers engaged in diverse regeneration initiatives. The findings offer practitioners systematic tools to anticipate stakeholder conflicts, optimize multidimensional value creation, and embed social sustainability across regeneration lifecycles, ultimately improving urban intervention design and delivery. This approach enables effective stakeholder engagement promoting equitable benefit distribution, mitigating adverse impacts, and enhancing community resilience and well-being. The study's limitations include its single-case design and contexts pecific focus on hotel conversion, which may limit transferability to other regeneration contexts and governance settings with different collaborative capacities.