Assessment Methods - Evaluating Sustainable Development in the Built Environment - page 109

This representation of the problem is more appropriate when
dealing with complexity.
However, the BOCR approach for problem structuring is often inad-
equate to support planning or design alternative choices because it
falls into reductionism; while the free-modelling approach is often dif-
ficult to be applied in complex decision-making problems. The next
chapter will present a new problem structuring approach, named
Multi-modal framework which is able to answer this problem since it
explains complexity without falling into reductionism and/or subjec-
tivism (Basden, 2008; Lombardi, 2009). Case study 2 in Chapter 7 will
provide an application of this method.
Another weakness of ANP is that it is time consuming: it may require
the submission of hundreds of pairwise comparison questions to the
decision-making participants, depending on the complexity of the net-
work structure.
Finally, the method has not completely solved the problem of rank-
reversal , that is, the change of the order in the final ranking when one
adds one alternative or criterion to the model. This problem was quite
problematic in the previous Analytic Hierarchy Process.

For further details
❏

Saaty, T.L. & Vargas, L.G. (2006) Decision Making with the Analytic
Network Process . Springer Science, New York.

❏

Saaty, T.L. (2000) Fundamentals of Decision Making and Priority Theory
with the Analytic Hierarchy Process . RWS Publications, Pittsburgh.

❏

Lombardi, P. (2009) Evaluation of sustainable urban redevelop-
ment scenarios. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers . Urban
Design And Planning , 162 , 179-186.

CIE - community impact evaluation
CIE is a method that results from the adaptation of cost-benefit analy-
sis to urban and regional planning. Its fundamental feature is that it
provides the measure not only of the total costs and benefits but also of
their impact on different sectors of the community, enabling the equity
and social justice implications of the decisions to be taken into account
(Lichfield & Prat, 1998).
The method was originally developed by Lichfield in 1956, with the
name of the Planning Balance Sheet or PBS (Lichfield, 1996). PBS was
explicitly devised to overcome the fact that many social costs and ben-
efits are not easily measured in monetary terms, so that the results of
any social benefit analysis was always liable to objections that some
costs or benefits were incorrectly valued. Thus the approach stopped
short of assigning values to many cost and benefits, simply indicating
where they should be placed on the balance sheet, either as assets or