Strategic conversations with public transport operators: Exploring collaboration towards future transport systems

In the face of increasingly rapid technological and social change, strategic planning is considered a valuable approach for finding short-term solutions to complex urban challenges while keeping long-term goals and visions. In particular, spatial strategic planning has been defined as the art of dealing with people in a politically contentious context, drawing from a historical and anthropological understanding of particular geographies (Healey, 2009). Under the described context, the use of future scenarios in strategic spatial planning aims to enhance the transformation capacity of strategic actors by offering alternative long-term images of complex systems (e.g., cities, transportation, energy). The main idea is to explore how places and institutions will be operating under a variety of future possibilities, covering a range of strategic goals that enable the common perception and prioritization of challenges (Mäntysalo and Grišakov, 2016). Such problem-framing process under alternative futures aims at creating and strengthening collaborative networks (i.e. social capital) during planning practice. Therefore, it is key that the scenarios’ outcomes enable discussions regarding collaboration strategies, that is, the perception of key actors, alliances and competition under a certain vision and a set of goals. Traditionally, the strategic aspects that ground scenario methodologies in the field of urban and transport planning mostly focus on the description of visions regarding future technologies and physical changes leading to the transformation of transport systems (Timms, Tight and Watling, 2014). Thus, during the depiction of alternative visions, there is a lack of attention to how collaboration strategies can use such knowledge to create common frames, motivating other actors to pursue joined transformation paths. To address this important issue, the present research studies how the depiction of long-term futures for urban transport systems can be used to revisit current collaboration strategies during planning processes. The adopted approach uses a set of exploratory scenarios about the future of transport planning in Spanish mid-size cities to gain insight into the collaboration strategies followed by key actors (i.e. urban public-transport operators). These scenarios include archetypical forms of collaboration and actors’ roles, pre-defined in previous research through a two-round Delphi panel with academic experts. The research was operationalised through a series of semi-structured interviews. Each interview first examined the current goals of the actors and their vision of the internal and transactional environments (i.e., that in which they perform current collaboration strategies). Secondly, they focused on the effects that alternative future scenarios would have on adapting such strategies. The content of such interviews is focused and later analyzed by mapping actors through typical planning roles in transitions’ and urban planning literature.