Models of Attitudes towards Urban Modelling

In this paper, methods originally developed by Saaty for modelling the importance of attitudes concerning particular issues are applied to a set of attitudinal data associated with the views of a group of experts on the development of urban systems analysis and modelling. Saaty's model is first described, with emphasis on the technique for recovering the importance or weight of issues from pairwise comparisons of the same issues, and with a demonstration of how manageable comparisons can be handled by decomposing a large set of issues hierarchically. These notions were used to structure the collection of attitudinal data from a group of experts involved in assessing the state of their art at a NATO Advanced Research Institute on Systems Analysis in Urban Policy-Making and Planning held at Oxford in the late summer of 1980. The model is adapted to these data and extended to encompass the idea of an ‘average’ set of attitudes through the construction of an average hierarchy from the individual attitudinal hierarchies. The ideas are then applied to the respondents' data. First a partial analysis of the twenty-four responses received is presented, and then a fuller analysis based on the notion of the average hierarchy is described for sixteen of these responses. A large measure of consensus with respect to the importance of different areas of urban systems analysis and modelling and the factors posing the greatest problems is apparent. From the analysis, several directions for future research both of a substantive and of a methodological nature are indicated.