Evaluating citizens' satisfaction on the urban environmental management through a multi-criteria approach: An application experience in Sicily

City appearance is accepted worldwide to be highly determinant of citizens' well-being and quality of life. This is the main reason why it has become one key objective that urban managers use as the baseline criterion to design and maintain cities. In this paper, starting from a set of pre-defined attributes, we investigated the applicability of the Multicriteria Satisfaction Analysis (MUSA) method to evaluate the satisfaction level of citizens towards the way urban development and management is carried out in the city of Catania, Italy. To this aim, we submitted a questionnaire, composed of items on the satisfaction about ten sectors of urban environmental management, to a sample of academic students. The analysis is performed at two different levels: on the one hand, we study how satisfaction in the different sectors affects global satisfaction with urban environmental management; on the other hand, we link the level of satisfaction in each sector to the different aspects on which the same sectors are evaluated. The study made it possible for us to state that, in the considered sample, citizens are quite demanding, which means that the expectations of the citizens are fulfilled only if they express the highest satisfaction level. Moreover, we documented socio-and health-care as the sector containing aspects that are quite relevant for the citizens, and so need to be improved to increase their global satisfaction. Overall, the results obtained proved the feasibility of MUSA application in the field of citizens' satisfaction with urban management and allowed us to highlight some peculiar characteristics and potentialities related to the method used.