Urban development is a process. In structuring and developing its phases
different actors are implied, who act under different, sometimes opposite,
dynamic conditions and within different reference systems. This paper aims
to explore the contribution of participatism to disaster mitigation, when
this concerns earthquake impact on urban settlements, through the support
provided to multi-criteria decision in matters of retrofit. The research
broadness in field of decision making on one side and the lack of a specific
model for the retrofit of existing buildings on another side led to an
extensive review of the state of the art in related models to address the
issue. Core idea in the selection of existing models has been the
preoccupation for collaborative issues, in other words, the consideration
for the different actors implied in the planning process. The historic
perspective on participative planning models is made from the view of two
generations of citizen implication. The first approaches focus on the
participation of the building owner/inhabitant in the planning process of
building construction. As current strategies building rehabilitation and
selection from alternative retrofit strategies are presented. New
developments include innovative models using the internet or spatial
databases. The investigated participation approaches show, that
participation and communication as a more comprehensive term are an old
topic in the field politics-democratisation-urbanism. In all cases it can be
talked of "successful learning processes", of the improvement of the level
of the professional debate. More than 30 years history of participation marked a
transition in understanding the concept: from participation, based on a
central decision process leading to a solution controlled and steered by the
political-administrative system, to communication, characterised by
simultaneous decision processes taking place outside politics and
administration in co-operative procedures. |