Building a shared model for multi-criteria group decision making : experience from a case study for sustainable transportation planning in Quebec City

Shared procedures to build a consensus within a group decision process are sometimes used in multi-criteria decision-making. Facilitators often face several challenges and the solutions to overcome them are scarce and not well documented. This paper presents a case study within a decision framework that combines problem structuring with the multi-criteria decision aid method MACBETH in order to build a shared preference model. The framework was applied in a transportation planning context with a group of professionals from Quebec City, Canada to assess and rank streets as a function of their potential to become Complete Streets. The analysis of the process showed that difficulties in expressing preferences, access to data during workshops, group size, group discussion management, and project length were encountered. Nonetheless, the proposed framework and the use of sub-groups to build criteria scales were a way to overcome these challenges and allowed us to successfully complete the project

Cultural Heritage Preservation and Territorial Attractiveness: A Spatial Multidimensional Evaluation Approach

The introduction of the concept of sustainable development in the field of cultural heritage preservation has stressed the importance of a holistic approach. Achieving a balance among cultural significance retention and economic development is a challenging goal, even more for fragile and vulnerable contexts with limited economic and social resources, low return expectations and a huge tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Given such a complexity decisions about where to place valorisation interventions with the purpose to activate synergies with existing projects and trigger economic and social development processes require to be based on robust evaluation methodologies. According to this instance, Spatial Multicriteria Analysis (SMCA) can support decision-makers along all the steps of the decision process, moving from the intelligence phase to the design and, finally, to the choice one. Within this approach, the study has been focused on the intelligence phase, in order to define a multidimensional analytical framework aimed at mapping widespread cultural heritage with a special attention to its territorial features. The proposed methodological evaluation framework points out the challenge of structuring a deci- sion problem related to the inner areas regeneration by the reuse of cultural heritage placed along slow mobility routes. The results are value maps that provide recommendations for placing culture heritage preservation and reuse interventions, meant as territorial catalyst

Choosing a Voting Procedure for the GDSS GRUS

In group decision-making, the use of Group Decision Support Systems is increasing and in some groups, a facilitator is required to improve communication among participants. The facilitator has several roles in this situation, which include helping decision makers (DMs) to decide which type of aggregation they would prefer in each decision context. Whenever DMs have different objectives regarding the same problem, they might decide a consensual decision is no longer possible. Therefore, other types of aggregation are required. Voting rules are strongly applied in this type of situation. However, the question that arises is: who should decide the voting method? In this article, a framework for choice of a voting procedure in a business decision context is used. It takes the facilitator’s preferences into account while it seeks to choose which voting procedure best suits the environment of the Group Decision Support System GRoUp Support (GRUS)

Territorial vulnerability and local conflicts

In the last years the number and the magnitude of the oppositions to new public (and private) works have increased all over the World, but the reasons of the op-position are difficult to identify. There are several international examples of conflicts originating from environ-mental oppositions as the mobilization in Istanbul in defense of Gezi park, the toppling of the government in Madagascar over land-grabbing, and the aboriginal ‘Idle No More’ movement in Canada against fracking activities. In Italy the most famous environmental conflict is the opposition to High Speed Rail in Val di Susa, but recently the referendum on the drilling in the Mediterranean sea has seen a very huge opposition front which includes also influential member of Catholic Clergy. But at the same time similar works didn’t face any (or so hard) opposition in different areas and periods. So we can hypnotize that the conflict is site specific but what are the determinants of the conflict? Can we explain the relevance of the conflict with the territorial vulnerability? How can the vulnerability be measured? What are the main dimensions of vulnerability? Several scientists analysed the relationships between the oppositions, which can degenerate in conflict, even violent, and the vulnerability of the territories where the public works are planned. The aim of the present paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the recent ad most relevant scientific papers which study the relationship between vulnerability and conflict by means of a bibliographic approach. Bibliometric approaches analyze scholarly publications and scientific production through various quantitative techniques, with the main goal of revealing how different research topic and specific scientific domains are conceptually and intellectually structured. Bibliometrics borrows the information it needs directly from the bibliographic description of scientific documents, available for download on several databases. The bibliographical data gathered in this study was collected from 682 articles from a wide range of journals available in the Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Knowledge; the search criteria included the joint appearance of the terms “vulnerability” and “conflict”. For the purpose of this research different methods have been employed to map the scientific production and to gather information about this research topic. The results of the analysis show an increasing interest in studying the relationship between conflict and vulnerability and the extension of the semantic context including several scientific fields