An institutionalist approach to transit station district planning based on two qualitative case studies in Switzerland

To harness station districts’ potential for transit-oriented development, planners collaborate across different sectors and multiple scales. While research has clarified this potential and the challenges involved, studies on the required planning practices are rare. This article adopts an institutionalist approach to address this gap. It investigates how planning processes for transit station districts interact with institutionalized planning practices and which signals for incremental institutional change can be identified. Based on two qualitative Swiss case studies, the findings show that station district planning remains a strategic aim of relevant actors without translating into concrete redevelopments of their existing practices. • Transit station districts’ planning practices have remained unexplored. • New institutionalism helps unravel how institutionalized the related processes are. • Processes take place despite diverging from local institutionalized practices. • Actors formulate integrated station district development as a strategic aim. • The incongruencies signal that actors do not align planning actions with that aim.