The Social Sustainability of the Infrastructures: A Case Study in the Liguria Region

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I appreciate your work; the paper, in fact, deals with an important topic for the evaluation of the sustainability of a infrastructure project

However I think some changes are required.

1.           Introduction

1) Explain better the goal of the work; the criteria selected refers to the infrastructures of the Liguria region of they can be utilized also for the evaluation of the sustainability of all infrastructures projects? And what type of infrastructures have been considered in the work (now is not clear)

3. The selection of the criteria for evaluating the social sustainability of infrastructure projects: methodology

2) The authors must give more information’s about the selection of expert; how they are involved? They refer to a specific infrastructural project of the Liguria region? The technicians selected are involved in the evaluation or in the design of the infrastructural projects?

3) Specify better how has been identified the 11 categories of criteria (they come from the literature review or are selected only by the authors?)

4) In table 4 is possible insert some example of criteria within each categories? This wold help to understand better the categories selected by the authors.

5) Remove from paragraph 3 the part on the evaluation of the weights of the criteria with the pairwise comparison method and insert it in a separate paragraph.

 

4. Results

6) Specify better how the weighing of social criteria was done and the meaning of the C.I. index

5. Conclusion

 

7) Specify what the implications of the study on the evaluation of the social sustainability of infrastructure projects could be.

 

Author Response

Many thanks to the reviewer for helpful suggestions.
The requested additions to the paper have been made

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Title: The social sustainability of the infrastructures: a case study in the Liguria Region

Cod: land-2069408

Submitted to section: Land Planning and Architecture

Report:

The authors have proposed a framework for evaluating the social sustainability of infrastructure projects for the Liguria Region (Italy). They have undertaken this based on the literature review, the reference with 24 infrastructure projects of the PRIS program, the formation, and consultation of stakeholders, and the processing through the AHP to determine the weights by criteria.

In general terms, the treatment of the information and the methods exposed have already been used in other works; however, within their context of application and object of study, they make this work unique and transcendent. Indeed, the conceptualization of social sustainability depends on the geographical context, its stakeholders, and the type of intervention (in this case, infrastructure). The manuscript describes in 594 easy-to-read lines the problem, course of action, and the results to determine a structure of social sustainability criteria; however, some concerns need to be considered before publication to provide greater consistency to the report and rigor and reliability to the results. Next, I express some points to pay attention to.

·        Lines 64 and 65: A greater clarity of the expressed idea would be appropriate.

·        The AHP technique implies considering independent variables or criteria that can be structured in a hierarchical decision-making model. This, in some cases, is in contradiction with variables of social repercussion since they are not independent and have a high degree of relationship, correlation, or causality between them. How do you guarantee that the indicators and criteria to determine the social sustainability of infrastructures are independent in such a way that their measurement represents the social contribution of an infrastructure?

·        Line 211: It would be appropriate to clarify the search structure; that is, what are the search fields, the words and their synonyms that represent each field, and the Boolean operators used to structure simultaneous fields represented in the articles found.

·        Table 1 is unnecessary if Figure 4 is presented

·        Improve the sharpness of figure 4

·        Identifying the methods or techniques that represent the process of forming the stakeholder panel and the systematization of information capture is recommended.

·        Something relevant and novel in this reviewer's opinion is the inclusion of the evidence of projects (24) in the evaluation of the criteria of social sustainability of infrastructure. However, it is not the system that involves the projects and the literature review criteria in evaluating the stakeholders. It would be appropriate to clarify this point and provide more background or formats to triangulate the information.

·        When the AHP family method is applied, the main problem is usually the achievement of consistency, especially when comparing many variables. In some cases, this requirement affects the results; in other cases, they are automatically completed... What implication did it have in this case? .. How did you overcome this inconvenience?

·        How do you group the different opinion judgments of the panel? Consensus, arithmetic average, geometric average, or other. What implications and justifications does the technique used to have?

·        Improve the sharpness of figure 6

 

 

Author Response

Many thanks to the reviewer for helpful suggestions.
The requested additions to the paper have been made

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, my suggestions have been considered. The article has been improved. Best Regards