The Importance of Process in Planning: the Dublin Transportation Initiative

There are plenty of good transport plans for major cities, but few that are implemented and fewer still that have been transformational. At a time when planning imperatives are less about growth and more about adaptation to climate change, there is value in looking again at comprehensive approaches to transport development at a city-region level. Rarely is there a possibility of first_hand accounts of how a city that had failed to implement earlier (1970s) plans found a successful way forward twenty years later through an emphasis on the process of planning. With the bene fit of being able to observe implementation of the EU-funded Dublin Transportation Initiative (DTI) over a twenty- five year period, the authors draw on their first_hand knowledge of how the DTI was created in the early 1990s, overcoming what had been missing in earlier planning a empts, and how an insistence on confronting key policy choices was crucial. The detail in the comprehensive plan certainly ma ers, but it's the process by which the DTI was created and then carried forward, establishing a broad support-base, that determined its successful implementation.