Systemic transformation challenging time concepts of strategic land-use planning: breaking

Land-use planning has a pivotal role in guiding our futures, as its direct and indirect impacts on society and natural resources are far-reaching in time and space. Further, land-use planning plays a crucial part in solving wicked problems that need systemic, open-minded, and sometimes unconventional approaches. This applies topically to e.g., food systems as studies suggest complementing them with local and decentralised solutions to add resilience – which is posing pressure on the built environment to adapt. The capability of land-use plans to recognise alternative futures and to respond to systemic transformation seems crucial yet insufficient.
We approach this issue through looking at time concepts used in Finnish regional and master plans. It appears that land-use planning lacks different views of time. Many Finnish strategic land-use plans examine the future in a rather short time span considering their impacts, and the conception of time in these plans is predominantly linear. Most pressingly, we see plans where the solution is a locked vision based commonly on a continuation of the current trend, whereas there may be more prosperous futures to consider. If land-use planning does limit its view of futures, as a fundamental part of building the future of society, land-use planning can be seen as a bottleneck that prevents searching for alternatives to current systems and to the use of natural resources.
However, some alternative approaches to time known in Finnish land-use planning imply potential of exploring futures more open-mindedly. Through analysing these cases and further time concepts from futures research, we argue that land-use planning could benefit from challenging its conventional time concepts, to allow further exploration and to better respond to systemic transformation. Furthermore, we see that futures research could benefit from examining time in land-use planning.