Experimenting with scenario-building narratives to integrate land use and transport

Transport scenario building is often used to examine alternative future narratives when there is considerable uncertainty or when business-as-usual is no longer appropriate. However, the potential of scenario-building narratives to achieve a more-effective integration of land use and transport in policymaking remains understudied. This paper analyses groups of factors that influence the effectiveness of scenario-building narratives to trigger interaction processes between planning actors and thus facilitate land use and transport integration. The research uses an experimental approach based on three parallel academically constructed cases -co-creation environments with planning actors tightly controlled by researchers to explore causality. The Henares Corridor in the Madrid Metropolitan Area, Spain serves as case study. The results indicate that higher degrees of land use and transport integration are achieved when the use of scenario-building narratives facilitates complex interactions among planning actors, who employ factors from various deliberation layers (internal, individual, and global). However, the degree of land use and transport integration decreases when scenario-building narratives are paired with simpler interactions, where factors from one or two deliberation layers dominate. The paper closes by examining the implications of the obtained findings for policymaking, including a reflection on the research design validity, its limitations, and potential for application in real-life experiments.