SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT IN URBAN PLANNING

Rauno Sairinen
Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 9300, 02015 HUT, Finland
rauno.sairinen@hut.fi

The purpose of this presentation is to analyse the importance of social impact assessment (SIA) in urban planning. There is a general desire to strengthen the role of land use planning as a part of the urban environmental policy and sustainable development. Simultaneously, the need for analysing the social sustainability of urban plans is increasing, but the tools for making this have been developed quite poorly.

One basic planning instrument for this purpose is environmental impact assessment. In Finland the new Land Use and Building Act, which came into force on 1.1.2000, brought impact assessment as an integral part of urban planning. At the same time, the new legislation strengthened the requirements for procedural openness and communication. Anyhow, the problem is that the social dimension of land use plans have been studied quite poorly.

SIA can be defined as a systematic effort to identify, analyse, and evaluate social impacts of a proposed project or plan on the individual, on social groups within a community, or on an entire community in advance of the decision making process in order to actually be able to use the information derived from the SIA in the decision-making process. Social impacts of urban plans refer to various factors such as quality of housing, local services and living environment, experienced health and security, people’s ways of life, gentrification or segregation, conditions of transportation etc.

There does not exist any general social theory through which we could identify and find very strict causal explanations about case-specific impacts. Very often, the social impacts have contextual features and they represent complex social relations or dynamics. The social impacts refer not only to causal relations but also to social meanings and subjective (or communal) values. The methodology of social impact assessment favours a quite pluralistic approach, which can use both the quantitative and qualitative analysis. It is implicit that social and biophysical impacts (and the human and biophysical environments) are interconnected.

Findings of SIA can be fed back into project design to mitigate adverse impacts and enhance positive ones. As a whole, social dimensions provide an understanding of the social significance, values and meanings of urban developments, as well as of the appropriate ways of conserving, preserving and changing these environments for various uses.


Biography of Rauno Sairinen

Rauno Sairinen (DsocSc 2000) is a research director in the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the Helsinki University of Technology. He is a political scientist and sociologist who has concentrated on urban planning, social impact assessment, environmental policy instruments and environmental attitudes. His dissertation for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki concerned the regulatory shifts at the Finnish environmental policy, especially the new policy instruments such as environmental taxation, voluntary agreements and environmental impact assessment. His licentiate thesis in 1994 concerned environmental conflicts at local city politics. From the beginning of year 2000 he has been a member of the board of directors of the Finnish Environment Institute.

Sairinen, Rauno & Kohl, Johanna (2003, eds). Sosiaalisten vaikutusten arviointi. Teoriaa ja käytäntöjä [Social Impact Assessment: Theory and Practice]. Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology.

Sairinen, Rauno (2000). Regulatory Reform of the Finnish Environmental Policy. Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Serie A 27, Helsinki University of Technology.

Sairinen, Rauno; Viinikainen, Tytti; Kanninen, Vesa ja Lindholm, Arto (1999). Suomen ympäristöpolitiikan tulevaisuuskuvat. Gaudeamus, Helsinki.