The small world of stakeholder groups: Cascading concepts for urban change

Abstract

This research seeks to understand why some stakeholder groups adopt novel urban design notions and others tend to lag in the uptake of these ideas. Key stakeholder groups participated in a semantic differential task of bipolar urban design qualities. A concept mapping task revealed those groups who aligned in their concept of good urban places and by implication, those that differed. The results showed that architects and planners are early adopters of urban design concepts, engineers, developers and the community are an early majority of adopters and landscape architects and councillors are the late majority. A small world metaphor offers a model for the spread of ideas between groups. Keyw..