Isabel Scherer
Attached you can find my profile picture and here is my short biography: Isabel is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University with a focus on cycling cultures and the role of planners. She pursued her master's degree in Sustainable Urban Mobility at both UPC Barcelona and Aalto University as part of the EIT Urban Mobility program. During a visit to Oulu, she got inspired by the city's unique cycling environment for winter cycling. The city in Northern Finland became the case study for her master’s thesis on Oulu’s cycling culture and continues to be a case study in her PhD studies.
Sesión
Although recent years have seen an increase in studies focused on planning cycling cultures, there is still a lack of understanding of the key actors shaping those cultures. Moreover, current research misses to address the importance of narratives and histories in understanding how a city has evolved over time. This research aims to close the gap by creating an in-depth understanding of planning actors and their role and activities within the larger historical change processes of a city. Its outcomes reveal how a cycling culture takes shape over several generations of key actors and what interventions cities might need to foster similar outcomes.
Oulu, a city in Northern Finland which is widely recognized as a critical case of highly developed year-round cycling culture, was chosen as a study case for this purpose. Through in-depth historical actor analysis based on semi-structured expert interviews and document analysis, a timeline of key planning actors from the 1960s until 2020s has been constructed. Each individual contributed to the shaping of Oulu’s cycling culture with their own unique characteristics rooted in their underlying beliefs, values and assumptions. The findings highlight the importance of different key actors within organizations and show how diverse planning practices and their historical roles face the diverse contextual challenges for developing and maintaining Oulu’s cycling culture.
The findings challenge the current techno-instrumental rationality of transportation planning research. Instead, they point towards an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical research and organizational studies to examine the past and present of a city like Oulu. This opens new pathways for identifying what practices, and which kind of key actors, are needed to shape cycling cultures in other cities in the future.