Paper short abstract:

“Neighbourhood Planning”, introduced by the Localism Act 2011, promised to partially invert relations of power and expertise in English land use planning. I explore how social and material orderings are (re)produced through this new process, and to what extent this promise is being delivered.

Paper long abstract:

Planning in England in the early 21st century is perceived by many as a remote, technical, expert-dominated, top-down process which excludes communities from real participation in shaping their futures. Neighbourhood Planning was introduced by the UK Coalition Government in 2011 as a partial antidote to this, giving communities the ability to prepare statutory land use plans for their "neighbourhoods" - areas covering from a few hundred to tens of thousands of residents. Its stated aims included increasing local control, democratic accountability and the role of local, experiential knowledge, partially inverting the roles of 'lay' communities and 'expert' planners and other professionals. Drawing on STS resources and perspectives, I explore the situated practices involved in this new process through ethnographic studies of two groups preparing Neighbourhood Plans. A number of features emerge from these practices which will be of interest to imagining a more diverse and reflexive future for planning. In this paper I outline an inter-related selection of these features and their implications for the way that planning is done:

• The hybrid and iterative processes of translation and representation involved in the production of neighbourhood knowledge and policy

• The relations of power and authority between 'lay' steering groups, consultants and other 'experts'

• The disciplinary force of 'evidence' and its contestable meanings