9. Collaborative Assessment Processes

Large-scale spatial strategies clearly belong to the category of complex planning problems [15‐20, 14, 18]. They represent a challenge in terms of technical competences and administrative effectiveness, but offer also a very interesting chance for experimenting with collaborative planning instruments. Collaborative environments [2] are necessary to support the creative emergence of proposals and ideas best corresponding to the construction of a consensual and integrated vision of the future among different stakeholders, in which the settlement development, infrastructure and management policies become the structuring elements. The central question then becomes how to organize these processes of discussion and joint planning and which tools can be put in place to facilitate the establishment of patterns of collaborative interaction in these large-scale spatial contexts. The chapter focuses on the search for a working method to tackle these issues and reports on the experiments conducted within the framework of the CODE24 Interreg projects. The approach developed sees in the practices of joint assessment the central moment of spatial strategies’ design. In particular, the Collaborative Assessment process is presented as key instrument focusing on a dialogical mapping of the issues at stake and on accompanying the key spatial actors into the definition of a desired development horizon through a process of empowerment of their design skills.