Browsing by Author "Pihamaa, Juuso"

During the last decades the wooden multi-story building construction in Europe has been taking steps forward. In 1990s Finland was still even with Sweden in wooden multi-story building construction but in 2010s Sweden’s wooden multi-story buildings have overtaken much bigger market share out of the whole market of multi-story building construction, where Finland have not succeeded. The wooden multi-story building construction has had some political pressure lately in Finland and even some of binding laws have been modified in its favor. In earlier studies have been found that municipal planners have a role in a process of constructing a wooden multi-story building. It has also been found that municipal planners have personal power to affect building in general. The purpose of this study was to find out the factors that create boundaries to wooden multi-story building construction markets and study municipal planners’ networks between these factors. It was also an aim of this study to survey the municipal planners’ attitudes towards wooden multi-story building construction and study the consistencies between the attitudes and networks. All the above mentioned were supposed to be viewed from a geographical angle as well. This paper is supposed to be an explorative and descriptive study because of the lack of earlier studies in the specific field of multi-story building construction. The theoretical framework used in this study was based on an egocentric network analysis to be used in exploring the connections of municipal planners to the other factors that create market boundaries. The attitudes and the background factors were surveyed with a questionnaire sent by email. The interpretation of the sample in this qualitative study was done by using a statistical approach. According to the results the municipal planners have connections to the other factors that create boundaries to the market of wooden multi-story building construction and both sides of a connection do keep the connection up. The amount of connections that the municipal planners have vary so, that the planners that work outside of the metropolitan area in Finland have more connections than the planners working inside the metropolitan area. The attitudes towards wooden multi-story building construction vary geographically so that planners working in the metropolitan area have more positive attitudes than the planners who work in other parts of Finland. Over all the attitudes were very positive. The results also state that between the attitudes and the amount of connections to the other factors that create boundaries to the market of wooden multi-story building construction does not have any consistent connecting causes. The amount of connections seem to rise hand in hand by age and years of work experience among the municipal planners.