Integrated Strategic Spatial Planning? – A Practice-Based Example of the Communicative Challenges of Integration

The strategic spatial planning of sustainable urban areas requires integrated planning practices crossing sectoral and scalar boundaries. The hypothesis is that planning solutions are influenced by a variety of communicative dynamics over time. This research provides an analysis of a practice-based example of the communicative dynamics of integrated planning, based on the use of longitudinal time-series data of organized actor interactions during a strategic spatial planning process in Finland, supported by a series of participant interviews. Based on the findings, one can conclude that sectoral and scalar siloes are disastrous to integrated planning. The findings suggest that a range of institutional and actor-relational factors affect integrated planning processes, revealing diverse practice-related social complexities and micro-dynamics over time. There was a clear separation of themes and scales in the process, contributing to the actors’ inability of generating an overall understanding of the process, partially restricted by the co-existing organizational structures and hierarchies. In addition, multiple simultaneously ongoing processes, distrust, arguments, and disputes affected the actors' willingness to collaborate with each other, further reducing their capabilities of knowledge co-creation through the sharing of expertise. Further development of integrated planning practices and associated research activities will have to take into account the their irreducibly psycho-social underpinning. Ultimately, advocates of integration will have to face the fundamental question of relational being, and expand the assumptions behind integration beyond the dominant Western epistemology.