Facing urban uncertainty with the strategic choice approach: the introduction of disruptive events

Abstract

The Strategic Choice Approach (SCA) is a method meant to deal with operational decision in a strategic way and to manage different sources of uncertainty in decision-making processes. The paper describes how SCA can deal with the future in the specific realm of urban planning in current cities, which represents a typical example of Wicked Problem, taking into account the three different levels of uncertainties that the method aims to manage (Uncertainties about the working Environment, UE; Uncertainties about Related decisions, UR; Uncertainties about guiding Values, UV). We argue that these three types of uncertainties are referred to the ‘ordinary’ problems of modern and contemporary cities. The project of an architectural/urban transformation has to do with this kind uncertainties and implications – in overcoming a series of approvals of different institutional order – and, with this purpose, takes the form of a contract. Instead, this categorisation doesn’t conceive some new and uncertain challenges of future cities, around climate change, infrastructural disruption, insecurity, pandemics, at local and global scales, that are currently under debate in the cities. In this study we suggest that this character of uniqueness can imply the exploration of a new category of uncertainty in the SCA scheme, the ‘uncertainty about disruptive events (UD)’, a type of catastrophic or just unknown in their effects. First of all, we define the PSMs (Problem Structuring Methods) as methods of structuring the «wicked problems». Secondly, we examine the SCA as «a strategic choice process through time», taking into account the three different levels of uncertainty that the method intends to manage.