ABSTRACT
Planning practice is ‘a field where interests and social groups meet and clash under conditions created by the interaction of multiple forces’ (Melucci, 1996: 92). Planning practice will always be agonistic: a system of shadow negotiations and ‘interweaving opposites, of ambivalences, of multiple meanings which actors seek to bend to their goals so as to lend meaning to their action’ (Melucci, 1996: 95). Whilst recognition of agonistic reality is important, as Benhabib (1996c: 8) points out, without some form of agreement or settlement to an outcome of the debate, it is impossible to be sure that the (planning) decision will not be ‘unjust, racist, fickle, and capricious’, a victory for the most organised, vociferous or ‘best’ connected, as in my Western Australian examples.
