ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the evaluation perspective of the quadralogue, seemingly a non-word, to sharpen the focus of strategic assessments of urban/metropolitan projects. The original use of the word “quadralogue” is in a paper by Prosperi and Lourenco at the 43rd ISoCaRP congress held in Antwerp, Belgium in 2007. The paper was a guttural reaction to the theme of that event – Urban Trialogues, co-productive ways to relate visioning and strategic urban projects. The Belgian planning acronym “SP2SP” reflects a frustration with spatial planning (the first SP) as a planning metaphor and a potentially better metaphor in strategic planning (the second SP). In highly simplified terms, SP2SP reflects a desire to shift the focus of planning efforts from institutional arrangements and spatial planning back to project planning and analysis. This desired paradigm shift in the planning culture was accompanied by the concept of the “urban trialogue”. To place the argument in context, a book about urban trialogues (United
Nations Human Settlement Program, 2005) portrays a critical reflection of Local Agenda 21 (LA21) efforts in four cities in Cuba, Kenya, Morocco, and Vietnam. Inspired by strategic structure planning, the book sees three dimensions of urban planning and development – namely visions, actions, and projects – as a co-production. Generalising that theme into a call for papers for the 43rd ISoCaRP congress, the seemingly inconsistent examples that tried to describe the content of interest could be boiled down to a focus on projects that are socially and institutionally inclusive, visionary, strategic, have large-scale impacts, and that achieve normative objectives. This implies a multi-criteria evaluation framework. Part of the problem is that the “urban trialogue” is at best an underdeveloped concept and perhaps
even an underdeveloped planning approach. This is indeed the heart of our argument. Several observers, notably urban design professionals, have described
the world of planning as becoming more and more project focused. The quadralogue is really a project assessment tool. The idea of the quadralogue rests on two intuitive notions. The first is a concern for empirical verification – to state the need to move away from normative assertions commonplace in contemporary society formulated with no output or outcome. If there is no outcome (normative or not), there cannot be evaluation. The second intuitive notion is that there are meta-physical and meta-methodological problems in both the general social discourse (the “ether” of the planning world) and general knowledge about the contours of knowledge that would allow formulations such as multi-criteria urban trialogue idea to even be made. Accordingly, we illustrate the concepts and methodological concerns of the quadralogue, using projects from South Florida in the US and the Algarve region in Portugal. Given the ambiguity of the quadralogue concept, the choice of projects that fit into a single class of activity as “entertainment” in regions that have similar areas, climates and location of leisure amenities, allows in principle a more reliable way of illustrating the assessment tool. The chapter is organised as follows. In the next section, the contextual
problems of strategic project assessment are formally presented. Three elements of the quadralogue concept, articulated to date, are then described. To illustrate or test these elements of the quadralogue, a set of projects that fall into the general category of “urban entertainment/attraction/place branding” are examined in two distinct locations. The final section of the chapter is a reflection of the efforts achieved for this new conceptual assessment tool.
