21. Thinking Through Complex Values

This chapter explores how ‘thinking through complex values’ can support the structuring of integrated decision-making by orienting it towards the elaboration of strategic goals and actions able to create new values from the plurality of knowledge and the specificity of the context. With its normative, spatial, temporal, cultural, social and cognitive features, the context becomes the frame in which planning responses and behaviours can be shaped.

In its first part, this chapter explores the connection between values, knowledge and strategies, focusing on their interdependencies. The second part of the chapter discusses the role of evaluation within an integrated perspective, which is seen as an ‘opportunity’ to elaborate strategies and ‘organize hopes’ in spatial planning; the integrated perspective considers evaluation as an activity embedded in the planning process and supporting many other activities in that process, each time playing a different role. The third part of the chapter focuses on three case studies, in which the evaluation process was structured in an integrated perspective guided by complex value-focused thinking and based on a ‘combinatorial philosophy’. The three cases represent different attempts to identify complex values as premises for the process at hand and to exploit the plurality and diversity of knowledge in order to identify situated strategies. Finally, this chapter reflects the strengths and weaknesses of integrated approaches and highlights the need to view evaluation and planning as reciprocally embedded, mutually shaping activities.