Costs of noise and Italian urban policies

Noise is becoming one of the main causes of the worsening of the life’s quality in many cities worldwide, as by now is widely recognized. Its economic dimension represents a necessary field of survey both to orient the urban policies aimed to a concrete fulfillment of the improvement of the community wellbeing and to verify the convenience, for the private sector, to “invest” into solutions that assure an high acoustic standard. Even though in Italy the evaluation of the costs of noise is a field not much investigated yet, it becomes particularly interesting also in the light of the news introduced by the recent financial act as regards fiscal urban policy. The revision of the cadastral incomes and the identification of the “homogeneous micro-zones” reproposes the question of the impact of the noise on the property market.