Te Ara Mua –Future Streets: Knowledge exchange and the highs and lows of researcher-practitioner collaboration to design active travel infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract Transforming vehicle-focused street infrastructure to support a shift to active travel modes can pose a complex interdisciplinary challenge requiring innovation and collaboration between residents, researchers and transport design and policy practitioners. Te Ara Mua-Future Streets is a street redesign intervention study that aims to slow traffic, change driver behaviour and make walking and cycling easier and safer in Māngere, a suburban neighbourhood in Auckland, New Zealand. It is a collaborative project between a research team, local community and the city's transport agency. Community engagement, evidence-based design innovation and outcome evaluation are primarily the responsibility of the research team while responsibility for infrastructure funding, procurement and delivery lies with Auckland Transport. Notwithstanding a shared commitment to the project's vision of street design innovation for health gain, the collaboration and implementation process has been challenging. Drawing on analyses of interviews conducted with researchers and transport agency personnel at two time points, the paper documents the collaborative process – factors that threatened to derail the design and delivery of innovative street design and those that ultimately enabled construction of a non-business-as-usual, neighbourhood scale intervention. Differences in the professional norms and practices of transport engineers and researchers, contrasting organisational cultures and approaches to risk, and lack of organisational readiness and capacity challenged the collaboration. Sharing insights on factors that had jeopardised the collaborative processes became a catalyst for change, and, coupled with the determination of individual researchers and engineers, enabled the collaboration to move forward to complete the intervention and identify mechanisms to facilitate knowledge exchange in future transport and health, researcher-practitioner collaborations.