Many European cities are investigating how to transition to climate-neutral transport systems. Due to the transport system's complexity and uncertainty about the future, identifying drivers and choosing effective policies to make the city more sustainable is challenging. Additionally, the chosen policies need to be supported by relevant actors. This study aims to support the municipality of The Hague in generating robust policies supported by and within the municipality. We build on participatory modeling and decision-making under deep uncertainty to create a novel approach to address this goal. In two workshops, the participants formulated goals and objectives, created Causal Loop diagrams, and identified potential interventions. Using a set of possible futures, the interventions were then stress-tested to evaluate their robustness. By explicitly linking, for the first time, participatory modeling and decision-making under deep uncertainty approaches, the participants could understand the system better and deal with uncertainty. Participants gained insight into systemic complexity and methods to deal with it, the inter-relatedness of interventions and their effects, and a shared understanding of the problem and its scope. This study demonstrates the potential of a novel approach to generate supported robust interventions to achieve the goal of a climate-neutral transport system.

Cities are increasingly recognized as potential motors of sustainability transitions. These transitions build on existing as well as new infrastructures, and these infrastructures mutually influence each other in many ways, a phenomenon known as infrastructure interdependencies. These infrastructure interdependencies have significant implications for both enabling or restricting urban sustainability transitions but their implications remain understudied. We elaborate the role of interdependent infrastructure systems from a socio-technical perspective and explore recent examples of how socio-technical interdependencies in infrastructure systems influence urban sustainability efforts. We analyze infrastructure interdependencies in the Netherlands which is relevant because of its high urbanization rate, dense urban areas, and innovative developments. We distinguish seven socio-technical infrastructure interdependency types that can influence urban sustainability transitions: functional, evolutionary, spatial, life-cycle, policy/procedural, market, and culture/norm interdependencies. We identify and discuss contrasting multi-mode relationships of each interdependency example. Our results offer an interdisciplinary framework and examples of potential influential infrastructure interdependencies to explore, understand, and discuss the implications of infrastructure interdependencies for urban sustainability transitions.

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are geo-information based tools to support planning. Since the term PSS appeared for the first time in the late 1980s it has evolved into a serious academic subfield. In this debate, little systematic attention has been paid to the added value of PSS for planning practice. In particular the perspective of users requires more empirical attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering the question: What is the practitioner's perception of the added value of PSS? In doing so we first develop a conceptual framework including the most important added values of PSS observed in the literature. Next, we describe an empirical study of the MapTable PSS, a support tool that is relatively frequently used in the Netherlands. Fifteen interviews were conducted and a Group Decision Room workshop was organized in order to systematically gather perceptions of users about the added value of this PSS. Added values that particularly emphasized are improved collaboration and communication among stakeholders, something which resonates with recent trends in planning. The added value of a better informed outcome is, somewhat surprisingly, considered less important. In order to deepen our understanding, we recommend more research in different contexts and with different tools.