Bringing the value-focused thinking approach to urban development and design processes: The case of foz do tua area in portugal

In Italy architectural quality and public interest are at the center of a cultural and political debate, which has not yet been definitively adopted into our legal system. By recognizing that urban developments, both public and private, have to be part of a bigger and interconnected economic, cultural and social development pattern, in the last 15 years several efforts have been made to define a draft law on architectural quality. Designing quality alternatives is therefore a crucial issue to preserve and improve the quality of life and built environment. The public role played by architecture and the need to answer to different instances lead to consider the design process as a real decision-making process focused on values, rather than on design solutions. In this context, the paper proposes a multi-methodological analytical framework based on the Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) approach introduced by Keeney in order to address the phases of the design process, from the elicitation of objectives, to the definition of strategies until the design and evaluation of the alternatives. With the aim of providing a contribution to the empirical line of research on alternative generation, the paper experiments the VFT procedure within a design process developed by eleven project teams.