Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how, rather than straightforwardly enabling knowledge that already exists in the community to have effect, Neighbourhood Planning creates new centres of translation, which are themselves effectively de-centred by their relations with a network of existing accredited experts.

Paper long abstract:

Neighbourhood Planning is a new form of small-scale, community-led spatial planning in England. It brings together very different ways of knowing place - knowledge that is top-down, technical, and technologically-mediated, with knowledge that is bottom up, experiential, and first-hand. These knowledges meet - and often conflict - in relation to the amount, type and location of new development that is appropriate for a place. The power to plan rests on the ability to produce and mobilise knowledge that can be justified as legitimate.

This meeting and conflict of knowledges is not new, but acquires a new dimension with Neighbourhood Planning's promise to devolve and de-centre power. The practice of Neighbourhood Planning creates new actors which interfere with existing relations and arrangements and establish new processes for bringing together different forms of knowledge. This paper draws on two ethnographic case studies to investigate the ways in which these new actors simultaneously re-inscribe and reconfigure the expert-agency coupling, and can both reinforce and disrupt existing power relations and their associated modes of knowing. It explores how, rather than straightforwardly enabling knowledge that already exists in the community to have effect, Neighbourhood Planning creates new centres of translation which are necessarily distinct from the community and authorised to act in part because of that very distinctiveness. However, these new centres are simultaneously effectively de-centred by their relations with a network of accredited experts mobilising already-legitimized forms of knowledge. I conclude with some reflections on ways that this knowledge encounter could become more open.