#deliberative planning

[anniekoh]

When it comes to taking a seat at the table, not all sides are created equal. Architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange considers an underexplored mechanism of control.

“The table gives and it takes away: it can harden hierarchies but also create the space for speech.”

This is something that community planners often obsess over... how to arrange the available tables and chairs to encourage active engagement rather than passive reception. 

Lange discusses the Harkness Table at length, which was a formative piece of furniture in my teenage years. I suspect it is why I am still a fan of the principle of deliberative democracy, even if I have to brown-bag some cocktails to public meetings.

[commonplace-chapters]

"There is no possibility of retreat into an intersubjective rationality that does not bring power, difference, and conflict along with it."

- McGuirk 2001

[commonplace-chapters]

"The normative challenge for collective action in multicultural contexts is then to find ways of intercultural dialogue through which to reflect on meanings and understandings, to explore the cage of our consciousness, in forms that offer respect to individual and cultural differences. Public policy-making may thus be reconceptualised as processes of intersubjective communication in the public sphere, through which dynamic mutual learning may take place."

- Healey 1999