A participatory decision support system for contaminated brownfield redevelopment: a case study from France

Currently, participatory evaluation processes using multicriteria decision aids are barely used in the context of contaminated sites, even though they are a powerful tool for supporting land-use decision-making. The aim of this paper is to show how to apply such a participatory evaluation process (mixed methods) to the redevelopment of a contaminated brownfield site in France. Following the Model for the Operationalization of Democratic Evaluation (MODE), we designed a participatory process that enabled stakeholder empowerment to implement participatory multicriteria evaluations. We show that the (Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality) ELECTRE I method can be used to select consensus-based brownfield redevelopment projects and that such a participatory process can be implemented to ensure that feasible, coherent, and transparent choices are made for other brownfield redevelopment processes.