Browsing by study line "USP Systems"

Urban spatial planning is a cooperative mechanism in ethics which seeks to regulate how land is used, modified and arranged in order to sustain quasi-stable coexistences of dense populations with varied needs and values. Perhaps no needs and values are more varied than those of the many nonhuman animals which live alongside humans in urban spaces. Communicative planning theory (CPT) has emerged over the last 30 years to improve planning’s ethical content by navigating fuller and more diverse multi-interest, multi-stakeholder discourses. The perceived or real absence of significant human-nonhuman animal communications presents a problem for incorporating animals into communicative planning’s anthroponormative frameworks. This thesis adopts a socioecologically hybridized perspective to explore why and how animals may be conceived of as stakeholders in communicative planning, what values and practices produce human-nonhuman animal relationships, and how these translate to outcomes in spatial planning. Using theories which question the viability of the human-animal binary, especially actor network theory (ANT) and Callon’s sociology of translation, I develop my own relational perspective of urban communicative and spatial planning practice that may include nonhuman animals as part of urban spatial planning’s ‘decision-making spaces’. I use this approach in analysis of a spatial planning problem involving three species of nonhuman animals, the Jokeri Light Rail of Helsinki, Finland. From the case study I draw conclusions about how nonhuman animals relate, communicate and negotiate within spatial planning systems in fundamentally distinct ways requiring the development of new communicative apparatus and stakeholder engagement tools. In conclusion, I discuss the ways in which the animal-as-stakeholder concept might be affirmatively used by professional planners to achieve better outcomes for multi-species communities. This means conceiving of urban development not as a battle of human progress against biodiversity conservation, but a multivariable negotiation to reach ‘good enough’ outcomes for a multitude of organisms. I conclude that contemporary spatial planning’s ethical aims of creating quasi-stable urban coexistences demands developing deliberative processes of decision-making with and in a multispecies community.

Cities are facing pressure to overcome critical challenges that force us to rethink our unsustainable mobility patterns. Therefore, the transportation sector is going through major changes. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is one of the innovations trying to change how we travel, a concept that originates from Finland. MaaS is a concept that brings all the transport providers and modes into one platform. A distinctive feature of MaaS is the possibility to buy tickets for the entire journey, removing the need to go through multiple websites and ticket schemes. However, MaaS is still an emerging concept and therefore it lacks official definition. Finland has been in the forefront of this transportation reform with new legislation that supports the creation of MaaS. The public sector has traditionally had a central role in the provision of transport services where regulation and subsidies are needed. However, the new legislation strongly advocates market-based services, and thus the public sector needs to reconsider their position. Therefore, it is important to understand how the Finnish public sector and the parties actually executing the law sees MaaS, its impacts and their role in MaaS. The thesis is qualitative in nature and 20 public sector representatives were interviewed from 17 different organizations. The organizations consist of governmental organizations, interest groups, regional organizations and cities that vary in size. The interview analysis has been guided by concept of emerging technology. Emerging technology is characterized of being technology that can change multiply sectors at the same time but simultaneously has not yet demonstrated its value. The results showed that there is big variety how public sector representatives define MaaS. Additionally, the respondents felt there is a lot of challenges related to MaaS, such as working business model, lack of services, technical challenges, area of demand among others. Positive side was if MaaS would make transport more efficient and provide savings for the public sector. User wise it was clear that MaaS needs to be effortless for the user in order to compete with private cars. Overall the respondents saw more opportunities for MaaS than possible negative effects, but the lack of widespread MaaS scheme makes it hard to evaluate any effects. However, MaaS raised also suspicions among some respondents. As for the legislation, it did not gather any positive feedback outside of government officials, especially the openness of the drafting process received criticism. The results also showed that there is contradicting view on the roles among the different groups of representatives. In conclusion it should be taken into consideration how future policies are formed as now the experienced exclusion of drafting the legislation might have hindered the cooperation and created suspicion towards the whole concept. Additionally, it is clear there is insecurities inside the public sector caused by uncertainties related to MaaS. Implementation has been slow since public sector feels the government has told them to do something, they do not have ability to do. Nevertheless, generally the public sector is still welcoming MaaS. Especially cities hoped that MaaS would enable them to cut their service in low dense areas. However, there is still no will to financially support MaaS, it seen that it is a job for private sector to take the risks.

As biodiversity loss is identified to be one of the pressing environmental challenges today, Finnish cities have begun to follow in the footsteps of many European cities by creating urban greening plans in the form of increasing meadow habitats. The ecological and economic benefits of urban meadows are well understood, but when meadow habitats are brought into people’s everyday environments, it is important to consider how it affects people’s environmental aesthetic experiences. ‘Aesthetics’ is often understood solely as individual preferences, but the aim of this thesis was to address the aesthetic appreciation of meadows through the field of environmental aesthetics. Combining the fields of environmental aesthetics and ecology, this study provides a fresh perspective to the value debate over urban meadows. The analysis of the work approached the topic from the perspective of Finnish cities. After compiling the operational programs that solely consider urban meadows, qualitative content analysis was used to analyze what ecological and aesthetic aspects are brought up in the documents and how they are valuated. To emphasize the aesthetic perspective, it was further investigated through discourse analysis whether there are consistent ways in which cities construct an image of the aesthetic values of urban meadows. The content analysis showed that the documents have both ecological and aesthetic viewpoints. The ecological content emphasized that meadows are important tool in increasing biodiversity and also provide recreational possibilities for people. The aesthetic content focused on the cultural-historical role of the meadows as well as the experiences provided by the meadows. Based on the content analysis, three uniform discourses were identified throughout the documents. The first relates to meadows which are the remains of cities’ agricultural history, and their cultural and ecological values are easily recognizable. The second refers to meadows that are currently emerging from other green types such as lawns and grasslands reverting to woodland. They are seen as having ecological and recreational value, but as they are unlikely to meet the expectations for flowering meadows, city officials want to inform citizens about the ecological qualities of these meadows to avoid negative feedback. The last discourse focuses on the experiential side of meadows, but instead of talking about the environmental aesthetic experience as understood in theoretical research, the argumentation is restricted to visual and recreational experiences. The way in which the aesthetic qualities, values and experiences of urban meadows are understood in a professional context reflects the way in which they are presented to the users of green areas. This thesis has revealed that the terminology used in the documents referring to environmental aesthetics is insufficient and does not correspond to the concepts presented in the theory of the work. Expanding the debate on environmental aesthetics would turn the goal of ‘people tolerating unordered ecosystems’ to ‘how can unordered ecosystems be aesthetically appreciated’. While informing citizens about the ecological benefits of urban meadows, they should also be informed about the potential aesthetic values of urban meadows, such as wildness, aesthetic diversity, and how the ordinary environment becomes extraordinary.