"Digitalize or die trying" : Does digitalization enhance collaboration of involved actors throughout the planning process? Reflections of actors involved in the Stockholm Royal Seaport project

Urbanization is causing increased agglomerations in cities, this in return has made urban planning an increasingly crucial element in developing cities. Simultaneously as cities are growing in size, aspiration for sustainable development arise. The contemporary planning process faces multiple challenges, one of these is that it comprises multiple actors, with different interests, which need to coordinate in an effective way. As a response to this challenge, multiple concepts have surfaced, such as collaborative planning, institutional capacity and communicative planning. What these concepts have in common is that they all emphasize the importance of collaboration. However, what these concepts lack to acknowledge is the application of digital technology by means to support collaboration. Even though digitalization has received increased recognition within multiple disciplines of our society in the last couple of decades, it still has not paved its way into the discipline of contemporary urban planning. In Sweden, multiple initiatives have been constructed for the purpose of digitalizing the planning process, both on a municipal and national level. However, these are quite recent and are thus not fully established. This master thesis focuses on collaboration supported by digitalization and aims at identifying the opportunities and difficulties brought about by this. It assembles and compares opinions from both private and public actors involved in the Royal Seaport project in Stockholm. The results are obtained from data assembled through semi-structured interviews, with both public and private actors involved in the Royal Seaport project, and literature review. The answers were analyzed, and a comparison was made of the answers of public actors on one hand and private actors on the other hand. The results indicate that opinions of the actors, involved in the Royal Seaport project, towards digitalization in general are quite positive. However, private actors seem to be more aware of the opportunities brought about by digitalization. Main opportunities regarding collaboration supported by increased digitalization include a more cohesive information flow, equal information access, increased efficiency and thus streamlining the planning process, simplified communication and reduced number of possible mistakes made in the later stages of the planning process. Whereas, the main challenges identified are that actors have different background, are of different generations and cultures, the different administrations within the municipality, information and data are not standardized, there is no one in charge of coordinating the data and implementing digitalization in practice within the municipality, it is time-consuming and the available digital tools are often too advanced. However, the results illustrated that collaboration can be enhanced by implementing a shared database accessible to all actors involved in the planning process. In that way digitalization can enhance collaboration. Overall, digitalization is seen as having potential to simplify the collaboration of diverse actors in the planning process