The use of participatory processes for the creation of scenarios has shown relevant potential for dealing with changing and uncertain contexts in the sectors of land use and transport planning. However, there is still a theory-practice gap to be overcome. While future narratives are mostly focused on specific aspects linked to land use and transport planning (Timms et al., 2014) (e.g., technological developments; advances in transport infrastructures; new energy sources), limited attention has been paid to key agency factors (Wangel, 2011) that can increase the usability of future scenarios in practice: the collaboration mechanisms that should be activated between stakeholders, the public, and professional domains to make transport futures happen.
To address this, the present research proposes a framework for the introduction of collaboration in three different dimensions (relational, structural, and cognitive) through archetype-based scenarios that can serve as input for obtaining a set of future scenarios. For that, a review of scenario narratives is conducted to identify archetypes of collaboration. Second, the validity of such archetypes is confirmed through a questionnaire answered by 33 experts from different fields in transportation planning. Furthermore, collaboration archetypes proved useful for identifying key divergences based on underlying worldviews, which could be used to build exploratory scenarios where different collaboration forms took place. Thus, by illustrating the narratives around collaboration, an innovative research avenue is open for bridging the applicability gap of scenario planning.
VIR2ALL