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Approaches from agonistic planning theory view conflict as immanent to pluralistic democracies and criticize communicative planning theories for disregarding such conflict and relying too much on consensus and cooperation. This criticism has led to a partial division between agonistic and communicative planning theories. The article presents the basic principles of agonistic planning theory and develops a criticism of its biasedly positive view of conflict as a productive force, as well as the significant gap between its theory and practice. In order to expand the scope of planning and to bridge this gap between theory and practice, the article distinguishes between three ideal types of dealing with conflict: (a) avoidance of conflict that is understood as disruptive, (b) conflict as an occasion for participation and consensus building, and (c) acceptance of conflict. These passive, reactive, and proactive manners of dealing with conflict are assigned to the comprehensive-rationalistic, communicative, and agonistic planning theories. Because these ideal types occur in practice in various mixed forms, the theoretical framework may help to understand and analyze the politics of planning. Finally, the article presents some planning challenges and dilemmas with regard to the ongoing transition towards pluralist democracies.

Approaches from agonistic planning theory view conflict as immanent to pluralistic democracies and criticize communicative planning theories for disregarding such conflict and relying too much on consensus and cooperation. This criticism has led to a partial division between agonistic and communicative planning theories. The article presents the basic principles of agonistic planning theory and develops a criticism of its biasedly positive view of conflict as a productive force, as well as the significant gap between its theory and practice. In order to expand the scope of planning and to bridge this gap between theory and practice, the article distinguishes between three ideal types of dealing with conflict: (a) avoidance of conflict that is understood as disruptive, (b) conflict as an occasion for participation and consensus building, and (c) acceptance of conflict. These passive, reactive, and proactive manners of dealing with conflict are assigned to the comprehensive-rationalistic, communicative, and agonistic planning theories. Because these ideal types occur in practice in various mixed forms, the theoretical framework may help to understand and analyze the politics of planning. Finally, the article presents some planning challenges and dilemmas with regard to the ongoing transition towards pluralist democracies.

There has been considerable debate about Habermasian-inspired communicative planning theory and Mouffe's-inspired agonistic planning theory. This study investigates the possibility of the communicative and agonistic approaches for collaborative planning in the Chinese context. It examines three common theoretical dimensions, regarding the political concept, the public sphere and the power relation. The recent political development in China is related to authoritarian deliberation, in which governments allow some space for deliberation and participation but with limited empowerment. The multiple tensions between governments and society lead to the fragmentation of public spheres and various forms of power relations in collaborative practices. This study concludes that a dichotomous perspective is not helpful to understand China's collaborative planning, which reflects features of both communicative and agonistic approaches.

Dieser Beitrag setzt sich auf der Basis einer internationalen Literaturübersicht mit Planungskonflikten in der pluralistischen Demokratie auseinander. Unser Ziel ist es, den Stand der Forschung zum Umgang der räumlichen Planung mit Konflikten nachzuzeichnen. Außerdem wird die Entwicklung von Planungsparadigmen mit dem Fokus auf dieses Thema reflektiert. Dazu werden zunächst einige Grundlagen zu Konflikt und Konfliktaustragung in der räumlichen Planung dargestellt. Daraufhin wird das kollaborative Planungsparadigma, das bis heute in Planungstheorie und -praxis hegemonial erscheint, kritisch auf seinen Umgang mit Konflikten hin betrachtet. Anschließend wird unter Bezugnahme auf die Arbeiten der Politikwissenschaftlerin Chantal Mouffe die agonistische Planungstheorie vorgestellt. Die agonistische Planung reklamiert für sich eine dezidierte Auseinandersetzung mit Konflikt, was sie für dieses Thema besonders relevant macht. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird diskutiert, unter welchen Bedingungen die agonistische Planung praktische Relevanz für die Bearbeitung von Konflikten haben kann bzw. wie dies in der Planungspraxis verbessert werden kann.

The thesis of the ontological primacy of antagonism, thus the political, is central to Chantal Mouffe's call for taming antagonism into agonism, or agonistic pluralism. Within planning theory, Mouffe's conflictual ontology that underpins this call has raised questions over the ontological assumption of the presently prominent and consensus-oriented communicative and deliberative planning approaches. This is because these approaches consider consensus formation as a normative ideal and always at least a potential outcome from open and inclusive deliberation, that is, ontological. Yet, the notion that antagonism is also an ever-present possibility for all social relations and therefore an ineradicable risk for consensus-building effort in planning practices appears to be increasingly accepted even by communicative planning theorists. In this article, I trace the origin of Mouffe's thesis of the ontological primacy of antagonism back to both her original collaborative work with Earnest Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and Carl Schmitt. With Derrida and Laclau, I then argue that this Mouffean thesis does not hold: antagonism operates at the ontic level in the social and it is only but one way of discursively inscribing the experience of exclusion and the use of power. This insight supports a new, post-antagonism approach to politics and the political based on the ontology of radical negativity. Finally, I discuss how this approach can be linked with planning theory by adopting a de-ontologised notion of the political. I conclude by arguing that since agonism is not the only option for dealing with antagonism for the socially established actors, for example, planners, its implementation in planning practice can appear merely as a top-down imposition of a democratic ethos. Sometimes, depoliticisation of agonistic planning might therefore be necessary.

Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism calls for the mediation of antagonism. In planning theory, increasingly influential agonistic planning theory has taken inspiration from Mouffe's neo-Schmittian radical democratic theory and promoted as its democratic task the transformation of antagonistic relation between friends and enemies into agonistic ones between adversaries. To accomplish this democratic task, however, I argue that it is not enough to transform antagonism into agonism and that agonism must also be prevented from transforming into antagonism. To this end, I first consider how Carl Schmitt's formulation of the political as the friend–enemy concept is presupposed in his understanding of the state and is linked directly to his decisionist theory of sovereignty. Transforming antagonism into agonism could thus potentially compromise the effectiveness of sovereign decisions and the unity of social order, and I argue that the mediation of antagonism should be considered to involve the mediation between friends and enemies as well as the mediation between chaos and order. Yet the Mouffean figure of the adversary cannot adequately address the latter. With Bauman and Norval, I draw attention to Zygmunt Bauman's figure of the stranger in the mediation between chaos and order and, with Sandercock, to a possible complementarity between Mouffe-inspired agonistic planning theory and Sandercock's postmodern therapeutic planning theory. This complementarity is then examined through a number of empirical planning literature on agonistic and therapeutic planning practices, and I conclude by calling for the recognition of both the Mouffean figure of the adversary and Bauman's figure of the stranger in implementing the democratic task of agonistic planning theory.

Economic geographer Andrés Rodríguez-Pose argued recently that declining peripheries are increasingly becoming 'places that don't matter' in the formation or implementation of national or European Union (EU) regional policies. In turn, this might result in a triumph of populist anti-establishment movements in peripheries, posing a threat to well-being in both the prospering and the declining regions. We argue that 'places that don't matter' also exist in Finland, a country that has a long tradition of regional policy and equalizing welfare schemes. Our focus is on administration rather than politics, however. We look at the Finnish peripheral regions of Kainuu and Lapland, discussing the practices of spatial planners, who influence and implement EU and national regional policies in these regions. We ask how strategic spatial planning in Kainuu and Lapland is affected by the revengeful and antagonistic attitudes towards the 'elites' who, allegedly, are not directing a sufficient amount of attention to the peripheries. We look at the planning practices and institutional settings within which they work from the perspective of agonistic planning theory, asking whether and how spatial planners can turn the antagonistic and potentially revengeful attitudes into productive forces that could positively affect spatial development in these regions. ; Peer reviewed

The paper critically reviews communicative and agonistic planning theories from the viewpoint of a systemic turn in deliberative democracy theory. While the approach reveals complementarities between the theories, it also argues that each theory is vulnerable to criticism because of an 'institutional gap'. The theories are found to complement each other in addressing planning conflicts at different dimensions. Communicative planning theory deals with conflicts between different stakeholders' interests in planning processes. Agonistic planning theory, in turn, concentrates on conflicts from a more ontological dimension, related to the (implicit) conflict between hegemonic and marginalized discourses and related identity-forming processes of inclusion and exclusion in planning policies and governance. The institutional gap of communicative planning theory is argued to reside in its focus on situational deliberation that largely ignores the institutional dimension of rules and norms of democratic conduct. Agonistic pluralism, in turn, does engage with the dimension of democratic institutions, but in an overly critical manner, making it difficult for agonistic planning theory to address the dynamic interplay between institutional reconfiguration and policy stabilization in planning. This is argued to be the institutional gap of agonistic planning theory. The paper calls for further work in the field of planning theory to incorporate a systemic approach to deliberative democracy and thereby tap into the dialectics of institutional and situational dimensions of planning.

Although community project planning is widely understood as crucial to equitable wind energy infrastructure planning, involved members of the public nevertheless perceive such participatory interventions as merely pseudo-participatory. Drawing on agonistic planning literature, we argue that this disposition towards tokenism can only be tackled with a (re)politization of community project planning practices. This includes an explicit (re)integration and cultivation of dissent and the potential overthrow of traditionally consensus-oriented formats that follow the deliberative paradigm. For radically political community energy project planning, however, public discourses must be fluid and participants must be open towards dissent, which largely contradicts the typical postures of a deliberative citizen who is supposed to argue in a rational and objective way, using the best arguments to convince others. To examine the feasibility of agonistic approaches for community wind energy planning, we conducted a quantitative discourse analysis on the data set of a large regional survey of an on-going wind energy planning project in Switzerland. We focused on estimating the degree of hegemony of public wind energy discourses and the willingness of residents to engage in participatory settings that can facilitate radically political community project planning (e.g., substantive participation settings). Our results show that for planning individual wind energy projects, the potential for agonistic planning approaches is low, not only because the discourses are already too hegemonic, but also because there is no real willingness to engage in radically political community wind energy project planning. In the context of early, comprehensive, and integrated community planning, however, agonistic approaches could provide the ground for open and innovative participatory planning of renewable energies.

There is no goal for public consultation in community planning, there are several conflicting ones, using Chantal Mouffes model of democracy to acknowledge the conflictual nature of democratic politics, not striving for consensus but agonistic pluralism. Our work builds on experience from co-design workshops we held in Upplands Väsby concerning a conflict between politicians, civil servants and citizens. Seeing the workshop as a space of agonism, an arena for different positions to meet and negotiate, we as designers work with form and material to support the different interests. We suggest three categories to consider when crafting this agonistic space; perspectives, format and material. Acknowledging the complexity of planning, no longer striving for consensus but to keep the negotiation alive, is a starting-point for understanding the different conflicting interests and together create ways of working well with wickedness through making more sensible judgements.

AbstractIn urban planning, inclusion is not necessarily achieved by increasing opportunities for deliberation between planners and residents, as power and exclusion reside in the process of deliberation, especially in the rigid spaces of formal planning hearings. Planners' professional jargon may remain inaccessible to residents, who grasp their living environment in terms of the flow of sensory and social interactions. So the framework of instrumental rationality may exclude softer, yet meaningful, local stories. What is needed in urban planning is a sensitivity for the plurality of these stories. In this article we propose that applied drama methods could provide a novel model for deliberative planning, in order to surpass the silo thinking of instrumental rationality, and ingrained, taken‐for‐granted concepts and identities, by artistic and affective means of argumentation. Furthermore, it seems that residents gain access to the embodied understanding of different trajectories of meaning making by playing the roles of other residents. Drama may provide a channel of expression that helps people move beyond the antagonistic posturing between stakeholders, as well as an empowering way to express the plurality of stories in neighbourhood spaces.

The article re-examines Charles E Lindblom's theory of partisan mutual adjustment (PMA), by reflecting on the recent ideas on cross-cultural cooperation and communication, developed in sociological studies of science and technology. While the critical arguments of the so-called communicative (or collaborative) planning theorists on PMA are well known and well placed, they may have overlooked the complexities of planning communication. Especially Peter Galison's concept of ' trading zone' offers a fresh outlook on these complexities. In the article, Lindblomian bargaining and compromise-seeking are re-interpreted in terms of creating a local trading zone between the stakeholders representing different cultures of meaning and value. This approach challenges two assumptions that have become commonplace in the planning theoretical debate around PMA: firstly, that trading between interests would not necessitate mutual dialogue and generation of a realm of shared understandings, and secondly, that approaching planning communication as trading between interests would mean adopting the political ideology of (neo)liberalism.

Theories of urban democracy that are relevant, critical and take sufficient account of the pervasiveness of power continue to pose challenges. Two theoretical frameworks dominate in relation to planning and democracy – Habermasian-inspired communicative planning theory and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. Both theoretical frames are typically held to be incommensurable because of fundamental ontological and epistemological differences and the debate between proponents of each tends to be polemic. Both theories have complementary strengths and weaknesses in terms of the insights they are capable of providing. Moreover, the realities of urban governance situations often display characteristics that can be explained in terms of both theoretical framings. This article negotiates a path beyond the polemic debate. It problematizes both theoretical frameworks and negotiates a way forward for planning theory that co-opts the principles of one into a theoretical framework that assumes the ontological position of the other. In so doing the article proposes a two-pronged approach that provides a critical, adaptive and reflexive approach to inquiring into spaces of urban democracy.