Is there a crisis of participatory planning?

Abstract

The critical literature on participation warns that a focus on ‘consensus’ evades the political in planning, preventing citizens from confronting and challenging discourse and prevailing orthodoxy about the way the urban ought to be constituted. These critiques raise important questions about the efficacy of participatory planning and its political formation. Moreover, the extent to which citizen’s participation can ever challenge dominant trajectories has reached a point of conceptual ‘crisis’. In this article, I explore the different ways in which participation manifests from the politicising participatory moments in planning. Examining a single case study in Melbourne, Australia, I draw upon 15 key informant interviews with community campaigners who mounted a successful campaign to defeat the controversial East West Link road project. By examining the formal and informal political manifestations of participation over a period of 2 years, this article challenges the sentiment that there is a crisis of participatory planning. It shows how decisions to engage the citizenry in prescribed ways induce other manifestations and formations of citizen’s participation through politics and how these manifestations garner a pervasive and influential trajectory to reshape participatory planning.