Stakeholder Involvement and Design Thinking in Swedish Urban Projects - Practitioners’ Perspective

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores how urban practitioners in Sweden experience stakeholder involvement when working with design thinking approaches in city projects, and what they perceive as enabling or challenging such involvement in practice. The study addresses a gap in the literature by focusing on the practitioner perspective, rather than treating design thinking only as a conceptual or organisational approach. Based on fifteen semi-structured interviews with practitioners in municipal, consultancy, and research-adjacent roles, the study uses reflexive thematic analysis to identify four themes. The findings show that stakeholder voices are valued for the situated knowledge they bring, but that recognition does not necessarily translate into influence. They further show that timing matters less as a simple question of early involvement and more as a question of whether projects are commissioned with enough openness for stakeholder input to shape the problem frame. The study also finds that the logic associated with design thinking often appears in Swedish urban practice under other labels, including service design, deliberative democracy, participatory design, and consequence analysis. Finally, the findings suggest that mandate, resources, political backing, and organisational coordination are decisive conditions for whether stakeholder involvement can affect project direction. The thesis argues that the participatory possibilities of urban projects are shaped more by commissioning and institutional conditions than by method alone.