Dialogue and transparency in decision-making

The “Laudato si’” Encyclical gives awareness of contemporary urban issues by integrating social and environmental questions. Urban degeneration is presented as a social issue, showing the need to understand the city as a common good, and to support the right and duty of all citizens to participate in decisions. Therefore we should address the decision-making processes that affect the city as to their content of justice and fairness, the need for actual democratic governance the refuse of market supremacy, adopting a wide-ranging (non-sectoral, non-contingent and non-selfish) approach. According to a prescriptive theory of urban decision-making process, centred on the right and duty of every citizen to actively participate in the city governance, urban transformation strategies and projects are no longer individual, but rather, collective and multilateral. This has deep consequences and implications on evaluation theories and practices that we should consider. The evaluation of urban transformation projects in the suburbs differs from evaluations performed in other parts of the city as the concept of evaluation expands: it is no longer just a judgment or a certification, but also a tool of knowledge and a means for empowering citizens (Floridia, 2007). In presence of proposals, initiatives, plans, programs, projects affecting the suburbs an explicit and scientifically sustainable evaluation should understand and control the reasoning that underlies the decision and verify its adequacy. In this way, anyone will be able to know what is happening, why it is happening and what will happen, in order to make informed decisions. As a matter of fact, each actor has the right to govern their own evaluation process, supporting their stance at the stakeholders negotiating table (Bentivegna, 2015 unpublished). This means that we need to establish who are the recipients of the evaluation because the choice of the evaluation procedure depends on whom the recipients are. If we acknowledge the collective dimension of the decision process, individual evaluations are not useful, either developed by the public administration or private developers to make effective decisions. If the attention shifts from the traditional individual interests to the community ones, the evaluation should focus on the collective and public content of the decision acquiring a political dimension. Participation in the decision-making process is considered an important step forward in the construction of economically and socially efficient projects, and a method to deal with complexity. But participation is a complex and delicate procedure that can produce unwanted and counterproductive effects. Concluding evaluation of urban regeneration projects of the suburbs may be useful because it may be considered as a cognitive tool, which provides the inhabitants of the suburbs with the knowledge that enables them to consciously and effectively participate in the collective decision-making; a decision-making tool, which fosters the construction of suburban inhabitants’ specific knowledge useful to support their point of view in the decision-making process; a dialogue and justification tool, which fosters a mutual trust between the suburbs and the other parts of the city.