Values and Evaluation

The dizzying growth of human settlements generates unseen conflicts and challenges existing value systems in the domains of spatial planning, management and real estate. Valuation practices have long been called upon to set aside seemingly acceptable paradigms in which they operated with questionable effectiveness. Compared to the past, the search for and recognition of values under conditions of global risk and radical pluralism do become a priority. It is increasingly urgent to recognize new classes and dimensions of value, but above all to know how to put them into action as unpredictable social coefficients. The increasingly hybrid social interactions change the concepts of public, common or market good, testing the mainstream theories of utility and the very way of looking at the role of public administration. The following notes seek to explain how values do not exist in and of themselves, but are blossoming in their action. This invites valuation practices to understand the genesis of values, their phenomenology and to construct updated cognitive pathways.