‘From Bata to Prada’: appraisal approach in new Retail Design

Nowadays the quality of homes and social life are two closely interacting categories which require a more careful interpretation of the users’ needs. Their opinions, expectations and “desires” have to be incorporated into both the design and evaluation processes. With specific reference to the experiences of public housing, the practice of “user satisfaction” should be increasingly incorporated during the ex-post (or monitoring) evaluation in order to verify the quality and validity of the service offered, thus activating a real co-participation of the user in the creation and improvement of the housing service. It is well-known that the principle of customer satisfaction derives from the field of marketing as a tool to evaluate how and how much the products/services offered meet the needs of the consumers. In the field of the construction industry, customer satisfaction has been incorporated into the “Post- Occupation Evaluation”, an evaluation tool of the performance of the building “in use” through the combination of objective and subjective variables expressed by the occupiers. Widely used since the 1970s in Anglo-Saxon countries, Italy is still struggling to find a systematic implementation. In this perspective, the article presents an application of the customer satisfaction method for the identification of some interventions aimed at improving the quality of a complex of public residential housing localized in Ponticelli, the second most populated district in the outskirts of the metropolitan city of Naples, in the Campania Region (Italy). Following a synthetic introduction of the theme and the explanation of the object of evaluation, the article discusses the methodology and the results, focalizing on some intervention hypotheses verified in terms of economic sustainability