Review of retrofit strategies decision system in historic perspective

Urban development is a process. In structuring and developing its phases different actors are implied, who act under different, sometimes opposite, dynamic conditions and within different reference systems. This paper aims to explore the contribution of participatism to disaster mitigation, when this concerns earthquake impact on urban settlements, through the support provided to multi-criteria decision in matters of retrofit. The research broadness in field of decision making on one side and the lack of a specific model for the retrofit of existing buildings on another side led to an extensive review of the state of the art in related models to address the issue. Core idea in the selection of existing models has been the preoccupation for collaborative issues, in other words, the consideration for the different actors implied in the planning process. The historic perspective on participative planning models is made from the view of two generations of citizen implication. The first approaches focus on the participation of the building owner/inhabitant in the planning, process of building construction. As current strategies building rehabilitation and selection from alternative retrofit strategies are presented. New developments include innovative models using the internet or spatial databases. The investigated participation approaches show, that participation and communication as a more comprehensive term are an old topic in the field politics-democratisation-urbanism. In all cases it can be talked of "successful learning processes", of the improvement of the level of the professional debate. More than 30 years history of participation marked a transition in understanding the concept: from participation, based on a central decision process leading to a solution controlled and steered by the political-administrative system, to communication, characterised by simultaneous decision processes taking place outside politics and administration in cooperative procedures.