Back and forth between openness and focusing: handling complexity in land use and transport coordination

This paper examines how complexity at the land use and transport (LUT) interface can be handled in practice, empirically focusing on a planning activity in Swedish national transport planning, so called Strategic Choice of Measures (SCM). Viewing LUT coordination as a question of handling complexity along two dimensions, one relating to the substantial issues of the problem, the other to the actors involved, the relation between open and focused approaches to delimitation of scope and the participation of actors are analysed in three SCM case studies. The study highlights two necessary but potentially contradicting conditions for LUT coordination. On the one hand, the complexity of problems at the LUT interface requires a comprehensive perspective and a diverse set of participants to enable a sufficiently wide framing of these problems. On the other hand, strategically rational actors will demand an approach which maintains a high degree of relevance for their particular interests, and the process therefore requires a focus on selected issues. The paper concludes that handling complexity at the LUT interface requires an acknowledgement of the need for both approaches, arguing that LUT coordination is benefitted by seeing openness and focusing as complementary rather than contradictory approaches in planning situations.