ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the difference from ordinary citizen participation, the planner role, legitimation, and the critique of communicative planning (CP) for facilitating neo-liberalism. It focuses on legitimizing features that are closely associated with the main attractions of CP, that is, its epistemological, empowering, and relation-building potentials. CP aims for right decisions through the mechanism of the Condorcet jury theorem, reduced misuse of power by encouraging anti-paternalism, and a stronger motive for participatory collective action by producing relational goods. Communicative rationality depends on the use of language oriented toward mutual understanding and sets CP apart from earlier modes of planning. Synoptic planning and disjointed incrementalism are built on instrumental rationality in full-blown or modified versions. Citizen participation is about inviting groups and individuals from civil society into the official planning process and creating arenas – invited space – for expression of opinion and information exchange between professional planners and affected lay people.
