B. Murgante et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2014, Part III, LNCS 8581, pp. 446–458, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 Spatial Multicrierial Evaluation of Soil Consumption as a Tool for SEA Pasquale Balena, Valentina Sannicandro, and Carmelo Maria Torre Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture Polytechnic of Bari, Via Orabona 4, Bari Italy p.balena@poliba.it, sanni.vale@gmail.com, cartorre@yahoo.com Abstract. The paper represent a check of the use of multicriteria evaluation in order to add a qualitative evaluation to the traditional quantitative measure of the sustainability of soil consumption. The experiment starts analysing all deriv- ing measure from measures of different typology of soil consumption and land use as criteria to evaluate which part of urbanised land is more expendable for land transformation. This application results quite interesting when utilised to create a set of indi- cators useful for Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), as instrument of measuring impact and of monitoring future urban development The work is subdivided at the urban scale in three different stages. The setting of measures, the creation of complex indicators as basis for evaluation criteria, the classification of priority n soil consumption. Results show the opportunity of den- sification inside existing settlements, but they extend the utility of the evaluation in profiling measures for tegional policies of containment of soil consumption. Keywords: Smoothing, TDR, Densification, Electre, SMCA. 1 Soil Consumption and Planning The land consumption can be broadly defined as a process that generates the progres- sive anthropogenic transformation of natural or agricultural areas through the con- struction of buildings and infrastructure, when it is assumed that the restoration of the pre-existing state of the environment is very difficult, or impossible, to because of the nature of the distortion of the earth matrix. This definition is characterized in a nega- tive way, because it is perceived negatively the problem of the diversion of agricul- tural or natural surfaces considering the finiteness of the terrestrial surface, and would therefore be more correct to refer to the concept of transformations of soils. After the ecological footprint, the soil consumption is a spatial measure widely used to assess the sustainability of territorial transformations. The ecological footprint is a theoretical measure, which synthesizes many aspects, while the soil consumption is real: it represents an element of environmental pressure and natural consumption of a resource, that is the earth surface, covered by a layer of soil generated by natural processes [1].