ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with briefly reviewing the contribution of collaborative planning to understanding divided societies. It suggests that authentic dialogue could help redefine the role of planning in dealing with both diverse and interdependent environments. The chapter highlights a suite of professional responses to issues of race, ethnicity and poverty. It demonstrates that Equity, Diversity and Interdependence offer a framework to advance the notion of discourse in divided societies where 'place' conditions the nature of the relationship between competing interests. The social production of space is "an important strategic milieu for a new coalition politics of class, race, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, locality, community, environment, region and other sites and sources of cultural identity and the assertion of difference". Sites of resistance have emerged where economic and racial inequality has interlocked to produce fractal places characterised by spatial concentrations of hopelessness and alienation.
