ABSTRACT
Planning, like any practice, are both an activity and a skill, underwritten by professional education, institutional traditions and regular performance. The bureaucratic culture that continues to manifest in planning practice is in potential conflict with three aspects of collaborative planning. First, planners may make conscious choices about how to manage the tensions that strangeness creates, adjusting established practices to a new, participatory context. Second, diverse groups may discursively establish their own ground rules for action. And, third, strange practices may arise contingently as groups 'muddle through' their issues and tasks. Patsy Healey has proposed that the planning should take a 'relational' form, analogous to a relational geography shaped by complex socio-spatial interactions. As the 'shift to governance' opens the bureaucracy to increasing cross-cultural and cross-scalar communications, such a 'relational' practice is inevitable. The chapter looks at the stories from Scrubfield and Harbourtown for some implications for how planning education and research might respond to these realities.
