Mapping disparities among stakeholder objectives in urban planning process. Lapinlahti hospital area as a case study
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Author
Date
2024
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
People Management and Organizational Development
Language
en
Pages
90 + 1
Series
Abstract
I set to analyse and explain the outcomes of the competition for the development of Lapinlahti hospital area in 2019–2020 through qualitative research. I focused on four stakeholder groups which I identified as relevant stakeholders of the given issue: Helsinki city officials and politicians, NGO Lapinlahden Lähde and property developer Nrep. My main research questions were as follows: What were the stakeholder objectives at the beginning and at the end? What kind of discourses or processes influenced stakeholder objectives? Through examining the discourse that took place during the competition, my aim was to identify significant discursive shifts that altered initial stakeholder objectives and resulted in the rejection of the winning competition proposal. Along with the data provided by each stakeholder, articles appeared in Helsingin Sanomat were included in my analysis. Helsingin Sanomat was shown to be influential in the process and it can be thus regarded as the fifth stakeholder of the issue. To map the process of changing objectives, I followed process theories and temporal bracketing strategy by Ann Langley (1999). Following the tradition of discourse analysis, popular in organisational studies, written documents were treated as agents giving meaning. Moreover, the analysis was deepened with interview data. After having collected all my data, I organised it in chronological order. By treating the data equally, no one source was emphasised over the others. I then summarized argumentations in my data, and subsequently went through the key arguments chronologically to discover the dominant themes and see how they were changed during the process. As a result, I was able to identify three main phases of the process. I believed that a complex case such as Lapinlahti was not to be explained in detail with the help of one framework alone. Only after I had gone through data and identified themes, I could see which frameworks allowed me to best explain my findings. Through this abductive reasoning, I e.g. linked my emerging themes to Lefebvre’s (1974) concepts regarding shaping space and its social relations. At the footsteps of Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999), and Vaara et al. (2006), I analysed how stakeholders gained legitimacy. Inspired by Ritvala et al. (2021), I studied how and why staining took place in the process. It was shown that the first phase of the process was dominated by a conflict outside the competition, but which made stakeholder stances clear from the beginning. In the second phase, tensions between stakeholders and their objectives were subtly growing as the public discourse focused on values. In the final phase public discourse was dominated by themes related to agency and legitimacy, and the tone of voice hardened to public confrontation. This affected political decision-making where initial tensions become visible again and the objectives of the development initiative changed. This corresponded with the objectives of Lapinlahden Lähde. During the process, Lapinlahden Lähde legitimized its status as a relevant stakeholder. The objectives of Nrep in turn remained unfulfilled and the legitimacy of Nrep as a stakeholder was weak in the eyes of the public. What dominated public discourse and affected political decision-making were themes connected to agency and legitimacy: who has the right to own and operate in Lapinlahti? Public and private stakeholders were contrasted and simplified as good and bad, or right and wrong.Description
Thesis advisor
Ritvala, TiinaPiekkari, Rebecca
Keywords
urban planning, right to city, politics, values, agency, legitimacy, discourse, media
