ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a review of communicative planning theory scrutinizing its emancipatory substance. It illustrates that approaches seeking to build a rational consensus and employing discursive conflict avoidance strategies make emancipatory planning impossible. Communicative planning is not able to break up power structures. On the contrary, through ignoring the existence of conflicts for which there are no rational solutions, it even fosters existing hegemony. A radical understanding of democracy, which recognizes conflicts and power structures inherent in pluralist societies, offers the possibility to systematize the concept of emancipation and to address the question of how emancipatory planning might be enabled.
