- A Strategic urban Process: Developing a Tool for Complex Decision-Making    278 kb by    el Samahy, Rami & Rico-Gutierrez, Luis & Day, Jacob | samahy@andrew.cmu.edu    Short Outline A studio at Carnegie Mellon examined a defunct Pittsburgh industrial site to investigate development possibilities. Using the logic of operational systems research, this case study should become a powerful tool for the planning process. Abstract Master of Urban Design students at Carnegie Mellon University are examining a defunct industrial site in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood to investigate possibilities for its development. A consortium of local non-profit foundations wishing to see the site developed in accordance with their core missions owns the land. A plethora of potential users of the site include two universities, a hospital and spin-off companies from Carnegie Mellon’s highly successful Robotics Department. Added to the mix is the desire for the development to be environmentally sustainable and to invigorate the surrounding Hazelwood community, a working class neighborhood comprised of ethnically Hungarian and African-American families, who have come upon hard times since the demise of Pittsburgh’s steel industry. The situation is further complicated by two massive transportation options: one, the continuation of a highway that would essentially bisect the site, and the other, a new public rapid transportation system that would connect the site with the main campuses of the institutions considering expansion to the Hazelwood site. Typically, urban designers would hold meetings with the various stakeholders to arrive at a master plan for the site. In this case, it quickly became clear that the situation at hand was far more complicated, as the stakeholders were numerous and no real programmatic decisions have yet been made. In other words, the possibilities for site utilization remain wide open. Rather than provide a single master plan, the group has created a system that maps the hundreds of various potential decisions, to understand their causality, and to identify the various spatial implications of each decision. Using the logic of operational systems research, they have affixed surface area values to each possible outcome, allowing decision makers to make more informed choices with regards to site capacity. Now in the process of collaborating with computer programmers, it is our intention that the outcome of this case study becomes a powerful tool for the pre- programming phase of the planning process. Keywords Pittsburgh, post-industrial, operational systems, programming 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