• Corpus ID: 18263043

Consensus-building in a Multi-Participant Spatial Decision Support System

@inproceedings{Feick1999ConsensusbuildingIA,
  title={Consensus-building in a Multi-Participant Spatial Decision Support System},
  author={Rob Feick and D G Hall},
  year={1999}
}

• Rob Feick, D. Hall
• Published 1999
• Economics

17 Introduction Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have gained increasing acceptance as important tools for the organization, manipulation and display of data pertinent to many urban and regional planning activities. Much of the success of GIS implementation in the planning field has been in the areas of task automation, spatial data creation and enhanced map and tabular report production. Particularly significant are the capabilities of GIS to integrate large volumes of spatial and non-spatial data and enhance problem understanding through visualization of data in map form. However, at the strategic or policy-making level of decision-making, the contributions of GIS still appear to be quite limited. At this level, planning activity centres upon resolving complex and ill-structured problems characterized by multiple objectives, multiple considerations, numerous participants, and a host of uncertainties (Janssen and Rietveld, 1990, 129). Frequently, conflict exists between planning objectives and the vested interests of groups involved in the planning process. It is argued in this paper, that an integration of GIS and Multiple Criteria Analysis (MCA) allows conflict to be reduced by providing mechanisms for revealing participants’ preferences, exploring compromise alternatives and for building consensus. This paper provides an illustration of the potential of this approach through a discussion of the design and operation of a prototype SDSS intended to assist decision-making in a land use planning context.