Operationalisation of travel experience in an integrated planning process: City of Lahti case

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2018-09-24

Department

Major/Subject

Mcode

ENG26

Degree programme

Master's Programme in Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering (SPT)

Language

en

Pages

65+25

Series

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the concept of travel experience due to its critical role in promoting sustainable transport modes. However, the complex nature of people’s travel leads to a multidimensional and sophisticated concept of travel experience. Therefore, travel experience becomes a concept that requires an integrated land use and transport planning approach that can communicatively merge different types of knowledges involved in transport planning. However, there is a gap in planning literature in understanding how travel experience can be effectively used in an integrated planning process, which is also affected by the socio-material context of planning organisations. The aim of this study is to explicate the lessons learnt about challenges of implementing travel experience into an integrated planning process in a mid-sized Nordic city, i.e., Lahti in Finland. The study aims at unravelling the values and conceptions of planners while they are muddling through complexities and interdependencies of human-centric planning issues within organisational dynamics. This study takes a change-oriented, design science approach to the research methodology. Overall, the study shows that practitioners recognise the value of travel experience as a potentially useful planning concept. Findings suggest that practitioners’ values concerning the implementation possibilities of travel experience are at a transition from an instrumental rationality model to communicative rationality model, framed by the interdependencies between usefulness and usability of experiences with travel. Findings also show that technologies used in the planning processes mediate as well as shape the conceptions of planners for operationalising experiential input. Findings also show that practitioners do not always recognise the need for reflection, leading to disruptions in the generation of new units of knowledge. Finally, the dynamic and non-linear model of organisational learning is challenging to capture with the current research methods. Further studies on producing research methods accounting for the sociological side of the planning practice are necessitated.

Description

Supervisor

Mladenovic, Milos

Thesis advisor

Palomäki, Johanna
Laatikainen, Tiina

Keywords

travel experience, integrated planning, participatory planning, organisational learning

Other note

Citation