Dealing with multi-agents in environmental planning: a scenario-building approach

In socio-environmental domains the argumentative and communicative approach to planning is increasingly substituting the traditional approach based on linear control of systems dynamics. A weak and contextual rationality, multilogic and multivalue, substitutes a strong absolute rationality. More than achieving targets, the new plans aim at building discourses and visions related to evolving situations where different stakeholders can intentionally locate their behaviours, learning at the same time about themselves and the realities in which they are immersed. However, the need to build multidiscipline knowledge bases entails the involvement of manifold domains and different languages that hardly allow inter-domain transfers. A useful support is the building up of interactive platforms, where to modify positions toward a semantic convergence. The present paper shows an area-based application of these tools, for the integrated distancemanagement of different forms of knowledge expressed by selected stakeholders about environmental planning issues, in order to build alternative development scenarios.