Interdisciplinary and interspatial discrepancies in urban planning : a multi-actor-multi-criteria analysis of the effects of densification on accessibility and sustainability

Abstract: Density has increasingly been used as a strategy by urban planners to increase accessibility and urban sustainability. Particularly, it has been opted as a tool to achieve sustainable development goal 11 ‘inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities and human settlements’. Though densification is considerably impactful in realising resource efficiency and transport benefits, its effects are too multi-lateral to be used as a linear tool to realise accessibility and sustainability. This is both caused by the assume d knowledge-practice gap between academics and urban planners, as well as the complexity of interspatial collaboration between local and global practitioners. Particularly, the universal application of sustainable development goal 11 and the top-down approaches to evaluate performance in achieving sustainability hinder strategic interspatial integration. Fostering interspatial and interdisciplinary collaboration would require establishing a holistic indicator framework that acts as a foundation for contextualised project appraisal. Relevant topics were identified and validated by expert opinion to establish such an operationalised indicator framework that could be used as a foundation for practitioners to evaluate the effects of densification projects on accessibility and sustainability. To identify what topics planning actors across spatial scales (i.e., local, regional, and national)and between disciplines (i.e., academia and practice) value differently, the priorities of topics presented in the indicator list were compared by various stakeholders from the Greater Gothenburg region. Comparing priorities and identifying disparities was done using the methodological framework of the Analytical Hierarchy Process. More specifically, a multi-actor-multi-criteria analysis was used to compare priorities. The differences between responses showed that the gap between knowledge and adaptation might be smaller than initially suspected. Differences in priorities between planning actors across spatial scales shows interspatial discrepancies in mainly the valuation of public transport, urban services, and biodiversity conservatio n. Furthermore, notable differences in prioritisation by singular actors illustrate the need to qualitatively inquire certain topics further, including the role of inter-urban employment on transport networks, the incorporation of social factors in quantitative appraisal, the capacity of small municipalities to incorporate contextualised biodiversity conservation, and the role of a varied accommodation supply on metropolitan housing shortage.