Pursuing transit-oriented development: Implementation through institutional change, learning and innovation

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) has increasingly become widely embraced and pursued by politicians and planners in various cities and regions around the world as an answer to sustainable urban development and mobility patterns. TOD is achieved through policies and strategies seeking to concentrate urban development around existing and/or new transit infrastructure to spur compact urban forms, economic vitality and public transportation usage. However, implementation challenges of these TOD strategies (TODS) remains. This research focusses on the institutional aspect of TODS implementation and seeks to understand how TODS implementation can be achieved through institutional change whereby institutional barriers can be overcome through the introduction of institutional incentives in a process characterised by learning and institutional innovation. It explores the definition and understanding of these concepts in planning by grounding innovative conceptual and theoretical framework in multiple case studies on the metropolitan regions of Perth, Portland, Vancouver and Copenhagen through an experiential learning cycle. The research concludes on vicious and virtuous cycles in TODS implementation, the dynamics between them, the necessary conditions required for institutional change from vicious to virtuous cycles for planning practitioners and policy makers and reflects on the value of practice-academia research collaborations.