- The Keen Eye of the Quadralogue: Overcoming Intractability in the urban Trialogue    265 kb by    Prosperi, David & Lourenco, Julia | prosperi@fau.edu    Short Outline The quadralogue is the paradigm for the urban trialogue. This paper examines three key conceptual aspects: scalar dynamics, reversing the normative hegemony, and multiplicative realities. Case studies from South Florida and Lisbon. Abstract The urban trialogue (defined in the call for papers) can be boiled down to socially and institutionally inclusive, visionary, and strategic projects that have larger-scale impacts and achieve normative objectives. The quadralogue is the mostly invisible and poorly articulated paradigmatic framework that allows such combinatorial, and potentially intractable, statements to be posed. This paper proposes to make visible and articulate three key conceptual and methodological aspects in the quadralogue that provide hopeful paths to meaningful action. First, scalar dynamics must be understood. Scalar dynamics refers to the notion that projects (and processes) operate at specific scales, are normally part of some hierarchical system and therefore must be conceived and analyzed at both one geographic scale up and one geographic scale down, and are empirically knowable. Scale jumping or scale bending are bad things. Second, the prevailing normative hegemony within planning debates must be reversed in favor of the theoretical and the empirical. In an agonistic environment, planners have been reduced to (endless?) normative debate. IS (thinking in terms of operating systems of principal actors and actually defining and measuring desired outcomes) needs to pre-cede OUGHT! Vision is possible, but vision in a theoretical or empirical world is leadership as opposed to collaboratively defined consensus. Finally, projects need to be understood as a multiplicative reality. The key feature of multiplicative thinking is that if any critical planning objective is missing (say social inclusiveness), then the value of the project is ultimately a 0 – a failure. Multiplicative reality speaks to the intractability of trying to include too many normative ideas or supposed benefits in a project formulation. The above aspects are used to describe urban projects in both South Florida and Lisbon, Portugal. Keywords methodology, scale dependency, real Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper