Siting Major Public Facilities: Facts, Values, and Accountability
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 135, Issue 4
Abstract
Government agencies and other organizations responsive to a diverse constituency face enormous challenges in identifying priority sites for relocation, expansion, or new development. Of paramount importance is establishing transparent decision processes that reach accountable, defensible, and wise outcomes. Unfortunately, documented examples of successful approaches to evaluation, prioritization, and site selection are scarce. The purpose of this paper is to both offer a descriptive case study and an intellectually rigorous, fundamentally practical “best practice” approach for identifying priority sites. By employing value-focused thinking and decision analysis techniques to a complex site selection problem, we present a way to address common challenges such as potential technical and nontechnical knowledge conflicts, distinguishing between “facts” and “values,” incorporating uncertainties, generating criteria weights, making trade-offs and building consensus across interests. Our approach is contextualized in a Canadian government case study of relocating a $300 million dollar facility.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 135 • Issue 4 • December 2009
Pages: 159 - 165
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Apr 25, 2007
Accepted: Aug 11, 2009
Published online: Nov 13, 2009
Published in print: Dec 2009
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