Negotiations in urban development projects can take a long time, going back and forward to the designer many times, even leading to stalemate situations. Requirements can be set intuitively, without knowing what the side effects of the constraints will be for the urban development. On top of that, approval of all stakeholders is needed to be able to implement the design. An integral process of decision-making, with cooperation, open communication and considering everyone’s opinion, seems to be challenging when it comes to urban development projects.
Current decision-making methods, such as Linear Programming, are lacking in terms of cooperation between parties, only finding a feasible design for a group of stakeholders and satisfying one party. Considering preferences helps overcome this problem. In this thesis, an a priori design optimization approach (PDOA) has been developed as decision support system, applied and tested on a real-life urban planning case, Waelpolder.
The PDOA returns a quantitative design (Program of Requirements) for the to be developed area which is considering preferences and wishes of stakeholders a priori, before a design is generated. By basing the design on preferences of stakeholders, intuitively determined requirements are avoided and designs will be more compliant to stakeholders’ needs. The PDOA generates a design by optimizing on overall preference. So, finding a feasible solution is guaranteed, on top of that the approach is able to find a most desired group solution.
The Preferendus (based on Tetra) method, where stakeholders do not make the same amount of compromises in a design, is preferred to use in the PDOA rather than the goal attainment method, where stakeholders do the same amount of compromises. This is mainly because the Preferendus returns more extreme designs and can better show the impact of adjustments in requirements in comparison to the more moderate designs generated with goal attainment. In addition, the stakeholders of Waelpolder indicate that it is realistic that one party should do more compromises than another party. Therefore, the Preferendus is better able to support decision-making and open up discussions.
The PDOA allows a new direction in decision-making, where negotiations become an open glass box rather than a black box. Openness & transparency, which is one of the fundamentals of the PDOA, takes away strategic play between stakeholders. Stakeholders are forced to express what they want upfront, before any design is created.
The approach supports negotiations in decision-making as it provides insights in a rapid and simple manner. The tool allows requirement modification, thereby showing the impact of certain requirements and presenting alternative possibilities. In addition, long negotiation processes where stakeholders need to get aligned are avoided because of the required openness and adaptability of the tool.One of the stakeholders within Waelpolder is willing to implement the PDOA within its organization as slip school model in urban development projects, to investigate the effects of adjusting requirements. Due to the iterative value of the approach, the stakeholders are positive about using the approach in other area developments, in an early stage.