Trading between land use and transportation planning: The Kuopio model

During the last 20 years the city planner of Kuopio, Finland, architect Leo Kosonen, has been developing a new approach to urban planning, where land use and transportation planning considerations merge. A conceptual-figurative model has resulted, where the urban structure is understood as consisting of three different types of urban structure based on the mode of mobility each promotes: Walking City, Transit City and Car City. This tripartite city typecasting has become quite successful as an instrument in coordinating different planning, urban design and development approaches and political decision-making in Kuopio. It has also gained a lot of attention in other cities and at the national level, and the model has been applied and developed further in other locales with the aid of research. In this chapter, the case of Kuopio is analysed by applying the trading zone concept of Peter Galison. The general applicability of the concept in the realm of planning is further discussed with implications to power relations and context-specific mutual adjustment.