Abstract
Although freight issues are often the subject of controversy within urban communities, urban freight stakeholders rarely participate in local planning processes. This paper studies how different criteria to ensure actor participation in collaborative processes are practised in urban freight planning in seven Norwegian cities. The authors link different criteria of actor participation to Arnstein's “ladder of citizen participation”, and study if the collaborative urban freight arenas provide participants with enough power to affect the outcome of improved planning process for urban freight. Participatory observation of collaborative arenas in Norwegian cities, combined with interviews with participating actors, revealed that knowledge and consensus building allowed stakeholders to reach the fifth step on the ladder of participation. The findings suggest that city characteristics influenced what criteria were most important. One important finding was the need to introduce a tenth criterion ‘political and planning anchorage’, which seemed particularly important for private stakeholders' participation in collaborative processes. This finding may be of value to local authorities striving to enhance stakeholder participation and include both private and public stakeholder concerns in urban freight planning.
Highlights
To achieve sustainable and well-functioning cities the integration of infrastructure with aspects in land use, transport and mobility is crucial (Banister, 2008)
For the collaborative arenas studied in this paper, the national research project NORSULP (Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans in Norway),1 which aims to facilitate local stra tegies for urban development through developing guidance for the establishment of urban logistics plans in Norway were used as a frame (Jensen, Fossheim, & Eidhammer, 2020)
The criteria for collaborative planning are more or less practised when the affected group consists of private stakeholders rather than citizens, they do not provide any information about whether this group of actors is provided with enough power to impact the outcome of the planning process for urban freight
Summary
To achieve sustainable and well-functioning cities the integration of infrastructure with aspects in land use, transport and mobility is crucial (Banister, 2008). Legal requirements, community expectations and normative goals based on democracy and participation necessitate a collaborative approach to addressing urban problems (Raynor, Doyon, & Beer, 2018) Within this framework, urban planning struggle to integrate freight and logistics into city development (Cui, Dodson, & Hall, 2015). Integrated urban development requires planning methods that are adaptable, robust and responsive while focusing on stake holder participation (Lindenau & Bohler-Baedeker, 2014) to balance conflicting interests and ideas (Raynor et al, 2018), there has been little focus on whether the views of the private stakeholders are heard To fill this knowledge gap, we link the criteria for collaborative planning to Arnstein’s ladder of participation (1969) to examine to what extent collaborative urban freight arenas in Norway provide participants with sufficient power to affect the outcome of improved planning process for urban freight. The focus of this paper is how to involve private stakeholders that represent the freight industry in urban planning
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