Angela Barbanente

Scenario building for Metropolitan Tunis

Abstract Application of interactive and collaborative approach for futures studies provides a challenge even in countries that enjoy a considerable amount of personal freedom. What happens when such an approach is applied to countries where the political, social and cultural situation is different? This paper presents the case study of Metropolitan Tunis where a modified version of ‘future workshop’ was applied. This method, that enjoined the stakeholders to use their imagination and fantasy in an interactive way, proved quite successful.

Negotiative land-use and deliberative environmental planning in Italy and Sweden

In Western Europe political, administrative and regional fragmentation has become a conspicuous phenomena. This seems to have an impact on urban planning. One of the dividing lines goes between the planning of industrial investments and large-scale infrastructure projects on the one hand and Agenda 21-inspired planning on the other. This paper looks at this dichotomous development and its consequences in the context of two case studies each from Italy and Sweden, respectively.

Influencing ideas and inspirations. Scenarios as an instrument in evaluation

In his review of notable planning disasters, Hall proposes two ways for avoiding future disasters. In a turbulent age, the improvement of forecasting methods is quite problematic. Ranking near and distant futures requires images of alternative future developments. This paper investigates the use of scenarios constructed through interactive knowledge in order to evaluate near‐future policies and programmes. However, since scenarios normally have long‐time horizons, there is a tenuous link between the ideas and aspirations outlined in alternative scenarios and near‐future policies and programmes. This implies that such scenarios can in the first place be used to assess preferences in the near future in relation to distant ideas and aspirations expressed in them. They may also help structure the context and its underlying plural values, and enlarge the range of possible criteria for evaluation. In this sense, they require that evaluation remains open to the discovery of societal preferences, interests and desires. For this purpose uses the concept “exploratory evaluation”. The latter hopefully provides a useful instrument in evaluation. While the emphasis in this paper is on the methodological implications of using long‐term scenarios to evaluate current choices, it nevertheless indicates how scenarios might be used in evaluating policies for sustainable development in southern Mediterranean cities: Tunis, Izmir and Rabat‐Casablanca.

Evolutionary Technologies in Knowledge-Based Management of Water Resources: Perspectives from South Asian Case Studies

Water management technologies and approaches in South Asia can be considered the result of two opposite forces: on the one hand, the modernist push for technological advance and reductionist thinking supported by local bureaucracies and international competition; on the other, local attempts to develop adaptive approaches and technologies, increasingly supported by NGOs and more recent international aid policies. Despite the disproportionate power between the two, evolutionary patterns of technologies are not the result of linear domination forces. On the contrary, local technologies and knowledge seem to evolve through complex interplay between local and global pressures as a result of cognitive and practical interactions. In the attempt to deal with these issues, our paper analyses some case studies from India. Our particular concern is with the evolutionary patterns of water management approaches and technologies with reference to the changing local–global interaction dynamics. In this context, we discuss the innovation potential of actual interaction spaces and the role local and global actor networks play in shaping mechanisms of cognitive interaction and technological innovation.

Problems of Urban Land-Use and Transportation Planning: Cognition and Evaluation Models

The paper1 deals with the crucial issue of reconciling transport policies and sustainable development at the urban level.