Bridging the Gap: Addressing Community Severance through Socioducts and Social Value in Urban Planning : -A Case Study of Viskans Park, Borås

This thesis studies how urban planning and infrastructure measures can be used to mitigate community severance in the built environment, thereby strengthening social sustainability, with an extra focus on lessons learned from Borås Municipality. Community severance can be explained as how infrastructure creates both physical and social barriers, also called barrier effects, in the form of roads, railways, or local topography. It affects local accessibility, mobility, and fragments cities, which affects social cohesion. This thesis asses’ strategies to respond to these negative effects through thoughtful design, smart planning, where the Viskans Park project serves as a case study. The research design is a qualitative approach and consists of a document analysis and semi-structured. Both are interpreted and coded from a coding scheme. An extra focus for the thesis is on the emerging concept of the socioduct. A type of bridge to overcome community severance, with a humanistic approach to strengthening inclusion, connectivity, and accessibility. The results of the study demonstrate the benefits of socioducts. Furthermore, socioducts are still relatively unexplored and lack an internationally uniform definition. The results demonstrate several attributes that a socioduct should have, such as broad, green, seamless integration, increased safety, and a focus on sustainable transport, such as walking and cycling. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the problems surrounding social investment, including socioducts. These types of soft values ​​​​have difficulty fitting into today's calculation methods for infrastructure planning. The results also contribute to how infrastructure planning to counteract community severance is a contributing factor to social transformation.