Urban Planning as a Trading Zone by Alessandro Balducci & Raine Mäntysalo

Author:Alessandro Balducci & Raine Mäntysalo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Keywords

Boundary interactionParticipatory planningMultiplicity of actorsTrade-offBrokerNegotiation

7.1 Introduction

A wide variety of novel cooperational forms – whether institutionalised or not – have emerged in the urban planning practices. In planning, the main objective for cooperation is to achieve a planning draft that everyone can live with and this within a reasonable time. The idea is to find consensus among the stakeholders, but often this goal is not fulfilled despite of the wide repertoire of participatory methods. Although a beautiful idea, the collaboration between different stakeholders is not an easy task to deliver. The challenge lies in the multiplicity of people and diversity of subcultures that meet in the planning processes these days. From the civic participant’s point of view, the problem is to find place for the local, situational knowledge that is based on intuition and empirical experiences. This is hard to articulate as information that can be included into the plan (Asikainen and Jokinen 2009, pp. 351–355). As a consequence, the planning draft often simplifies and misrepresents the complexity of the social reality.

The knowledge used in the planning process is traditionally based on calculating and categorising information. These objective indicators of rational knowledge are very powerful and difficult to call into question (see, e.g. Gunder 2005, pp. 173–199; Leino 2012). However, Donna Haraway (1988, pp. 584–589) has argued for politics of location, positioning and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. From this perspective, the situational communication should be understood as contextual interaction, a space where local knowledge and values operate in a way that is meaningful for all of the participants and enable the coexistence of diverse social worlds (Leino 2008, pp. 41–48).

As Kahila-Tani points out in Chap. 5 in this book, one of the central questions in planning is how to create trust among the various stakeholders participating in the process. There is a wide repertoire of planning literature dealing with the question of trust as well as diverse empirical examples analysing the failure or success of collaborative practices (Healey et al. 2003; Pløger 2004; Rowe and Frewer 2004; Leino 2005; Nyseth et al. 2010). These somewhat inconsistent experiences in participatory planning have created uncertainty in many cities when concerning how to develop and govern city planning in socially acceptable ways.

One way to approach the challenge of the multiplicity of civic participants, their interests and knowledge of different kinds is to concentrate on boundaries. To be more precise, focus on the situations where boundaries are crossed. Innes and Booher (2010, p. 210) talk about boundary spanning, when they refer to sharing of information and building of understanding between differing agendas and competencies and, moreover, when creating the potential for discovering mutually beneficial actions. I agree with Innes and Booher as they argue for finding new, resilient and socially robust ways for enabling the flows of information and developing shared meaning among actors (ibid., 210).

The focus of this chapter is in the locality of participatory planning. The chapter approaches public participation

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