Station Districts and Institutional Transformation: The Salience of Informal Institutions in Planning Culture

Abstract

Station districts are focal points for sustainable spatial development in the urban fabric and play a crucial role in transit-oriented development. Planning a station district is a multi-sector process in which stakeholders collaborate outside the familiar institutional landscapes of their organizations. Therefore, planners need to adapt and balance traditional collaboration practices (based on formal institutions) with informal institutions, considering planning culture as the specific cultural framework that embeds planning. This consideration leads to transforming institutional landscapes. Although studies on planning culture have acknowledged the importance of informal institutions, they have not explained how institutional transformation occurs beyond technology-focused practices. Studies on sustainability transitions, on the contrary, have discussed the role of institutional transformation at the stakeholder level of tackling environmental challenges and beyond technology. Hence, the paper aims to scrutinize institutional transformation at the stakeholder level of planning station districts, using concepts from sustainability transitions. The paper is a work in progress and follows a qualitative and comparative case study design complemented by process tracing. From 2020 to 2022, data of two Swiss station districts are collected from documents, expert interviews, and participant observation. Preliminary results suggest that stakeholders may balance traditional, technology-focused planning practices with tacit procedural knowledge and soft capacities to form alliances. In both station districts, local stakeholders horizontally integrated collaborative planning practices and knowledge from the bottom up in response to the absence of a translation of strategic planning structure from the top down. Based on shared values and mental scripts, collective agency of stakeholders led to the local pilot testing of innovative planning systems and instruments focusing on stakeholder involvement within the expanded perimeter of developments considered for station districts. Informal institutions may have triggered institutional transformation by adapting and accommodating formal institutions and substituting the missing translation of the latter into the local perspective.