Urban planning as collective, progressive, interrelated and path-dependent decision making

Abstract

Although there is little dispute that decision is an essential component of planning, the attention paid in the literature for the implications of this fact is still lacking. Drawing from soft decision aid theories, we develop a descriptive model of planning based on multiple partial interlinked decisions and explore its consequences to the understanding of planning and its practice. We argue that, because of cognitive limitations, planners have to deal in a piecemeal manner with many interlinked decisions, progressing slowly towards a more structured view of the problem through successive decisions that differ from each other not so much by the subject area, but by the level of detail. Complexity has to be maintained on acceptable levels, and thus preliminary decisions are made among compound alternatives that synthesize some key aspects of the problem as it is perceived at that moment. The chosen compound alternative acts then as a framework for future activities involving both the enhancing of resolution and the search for alternatives in areas not yet addressed, i.e. in a search for more comprehensiveness of the final product. Although these preliminary decisions may be overruled further down the process, the costly nature of knowledge and consensus building often prevents it from happening, thus rendering planning processes more path-dependent than we usually like to admit. Understanding the evolving sense of the problem and how multiple interlinked decisions occur at different stages of real planning situations may improve the meta-decisions concerning the knowledge and consensus building activities to be carried out.