Browsing by Subject "kestävä kaupunkikehitys"

A common understanding of partnership goals is widely acknowledged to be one of the most crucial factors of a partnership project’s success. This thesis examines a partnership between the city of Espoo and five company partners and looks for processes and conditions that support a common understanding of the project goals. The aim is to support future sustainability-partnerships by giving managers concrete tools for facilitating goal-alignment by answering the research question “how did the partners accept and adapt to a common sustainability goal?” The data consists of interviews conducted with the project employees from both the city and the private entities, the project contract and web communications published by the partners. The data was analyzed using theme categories derived from the literature, seeking to first find the answer of whether the official partnership goal was adopted an accepted by the partners, and then comparing those observations to the experiences that partners had had working in the collaboration. It seems that the project goal was adopted and accepted in this case, and based on the findings five key mechanisms for how that was achieved and what future managers can therefore consider were recognized: 1) the organizational goals of the partner organizations were sufficiently compatible with the partnership goal, 2) the partnership goal was broad enough to leave room for later adjustments, 3) the partners were further divided into smaller sub-tasks with supporting sub-goals, 4) there was a lot of mandatory group-work and 5) all of the above-mentioned features were taken into account already in the design-phase of the partnership, and programmed into the day-to-day activities of the collaboration.

This thesis offers views on the resident interests and participation in energy refurbishment processes by qualitatively analysing nine thematic resident interviews. Urban areas and buildings largely contribute to energy consumption and carbon emissions. The ageing building stock across Europe offers a window of opportunity for large scale energy refurbishments. Urban sustainability and participatory planning, the framework theories of this thesis, are both threaded by the lack of social focus, reflected in the lack of residential focus in housing refurbishments. Residents' main interests include economic reasoning, quality of life, and energy and environment. Economic reasoning includes concern of costs, interest in energy bill savings and stable living costs, and property value increase, indicating a rising market demand. Quality of life includes building condition, comfort, visual aspects, ease of maintenance, interest in technology, and preference on either shared or private systems. Environmental motivations vary and seem to correlate with one's faith in the effect of individuals and communities in solving climate issues. Good process practices facilitating trust include: activation of different information channels when refurbishments are approaching, personal and technical planning support, and a strong house strategy communicating residents the justifications and their areas of interest. Neighbourhood examples motivate residents and help them plan their own projects. As refurbishments make residents more proudly develop their houses and neighbourhoods, resident ambassadors can be used to replicate the experiences. Sharing and networking are already in place, but lack of promoting the sense of community may hinder such development. Existing co-planning reflects residents' strong position as stakeholders. Differences in participation power are found between housing cooperative boards and other residents. The boards dominate planning, justifying it with technical expertise and the difficulty of including everyone. This is accepted if an open communication culture is on place, as house meetings offer other residents a place to get informed and participate in decision making. The idea of including residents into planning is emerging. Participation benefits include residents offering good ideas, gaining knowledge, and achieving a stronger sense of community. Information and inclusion make residents more engaged to the development, speeding up decision making. A process model for participatory refurbishments is presented. Apart from the resident drivers active in house and neighbourhood levels, four challenging resident groups are identified: the unsocial, the objectors, the uninformed, and the unheard. Resident segmentation offers a good tool for identifying motivators to engage residents, as well as identify their needs as project participants.