ABSTRACT
Communicative or collaborative planning has, without doubt, become the dominant basis of planning theory during the 1990s (Alexander, 1997). This is not that it provides some blinding new insights or has been leapt upon by practitioners eager to approach planning in a radically new way. It has found its historical moment for a number of reasons, including:
• the shift away from the individualistic attitudes of the 1980s towards the more inclusive social attitudes of the 1990s
• the echoing of environmental concerns particularly Local Agenda 21’s emphasis upon ‘bottom up’ locally-led processes
• the need to fill the post-comprehensive-rational vacuum of substantive theory in planning
• its role in providing planners with the theoretical justification for their continued existence in the shadow of the deregulatory approaches of the 1980s.
As such, collaborative planning is the theoretical zeitgeist of the 1990s. I emphasise theoretical here because there has been no rush from planning practice to take on the collaborative approach. The closest examples in the UK seem to be Planning for Real exercises, though there have been many ethnographic studies that emphasise the importance of ‘undistorted communication’ in daily practice (e.g., Healey, 1992, Healey and Hillier, 1995). This lack of practical application has left collaborative planning largely in the academic realm. Nevertheless, its potential importance in making changes to planning practice, as well as its undoubted usefulness as a tool for examining planning practice, mean that it needs to be included as a potentially new paradigm for planning.
