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Using the economic approach of social choice theory, this unique book examines difficulties found in democratic processes involved in the creation and implementation of planning policies. Social choice theory focuses on the hard trade-offs to be made between rationality in decision-making on the one hand, and political values such as democracy, liberalism and freedom from manipulation on the other. As an institution can be seen as a set of rules, the focus on rules and procedures of collective choice makes social choice theory well suited for analysing important political aspects of planning institutions. Special attention is given to communicative planning and the logical reasons why all the desirable properties of dialogue cannot be simultaneously attained. The analysis provides original and significant new insights into the process and the institutions involved. It highlights weak spots of present planning techniques and procedures and suggests further steps towards institutionally enriched planning theory.

Legitimizing communicative planning -- The logic of critical communicative planning : transaction cost alteration -- Activist modes of planning: a systematic overview -- Activist communicative planning : hybrids of dialogue and strategy -- Neo-liberal policies in urban planning -- Conflicting values of communicative planning theory and new public management -- A strategy for examining whether communicative planning is serving neo-liberalism -- Responsibility for the end-use of theory -- Responsibility for inclusive deliberation in planning : struggling with deep difference -- Responsible decisions in teaching and academic life.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Social Choice Approach to Institutional Planning Theory -- Part I: Democracy, Rationality, and Planning: Applying Arrow's Theorem -- 1 Paradox of Dialogical Decision-making -- 2 Evaluation and Arguments: Balancing the Procedural Values of Priority Setting Techniques -- 3 Institutions of Communicative-calculative Synthesis: Structured Group Processes -- 4 Decision Cycles in Two Transport Planning Cases -- Part II: Public Interest and Protected Spheres: Applying Sen's Theorem -- 5 Democratic Planning and the Liberal Paradox -- 6 Loyalty Dilemmas in Advocacy Planning -- 7 Privacy as a Planning Problem: Transport-related Examples -- 8 Equality and Planning with Protected Spheres -- Part III: Manipulation in Planning: Applying Gibbard and Satterthwaite's Theorem -- 9 Power Concentration or Manipulation in the Planning Process -- 10 Planning Style and Agency Properties -- 11 Agency Profiles Applied to Positive Planning Theory -- 12 Economics of Dialogue: Hard Trade-offs in Communicative Planning -- Epilogue: Challenge and Response -- Bibliography -- Glossary of Social Choice Terms -- Index.

The purpose of this article is to offer planning scholars a basis for criticizing authoritarian populism and not limiting ideological critique to neoliberalism. Authoritarian populism is anti-elitist, anti-pluralist and excluding in that the authentic people includes only part of the population. Authoritarian populists imagine a homogeneous people whose will determines policy. The article deals with confrontations and contact points between communicative planning theory and populist currents. It distils several core themes from five authoritative collections of works on planning theory and examines their relations with populist ideas. Authoritarian populism is an incomplete ideology that can fuse with various other ideologies. Amalgamations of populism and neoliberalism pose new challenges to participatory planning. Authoritarian populism criticizes planning institutions for blocking the immediate realization of the will of the people and being sympathetic to social diversity and cultural influence threatening heartland values. Neoliberalism is opposed to the welfare policies, equity goals, growth restrictions and other public interventions associated with spatial planning. Joint pressure from the two ideologies may alter the planning of liberal democracies in an autocratic direction.

Activism was one of the main themes of the AESOP PhD Workshop 2018 in Karlskrona and Tjärö, Sweden. One of my presentations was about the activist roles of planners working for local governments and lay planners affiliated with civil society organizations. I have kept a close eye on the academic literature on activist planning for many years, and am still working in that sub-field of planning theory. My aim is to explore the limits of how professional planners with an activist intent can practice their line of work inside a bureaucracy, and to study how actors from the civil society can use spatial planning and local environmental planning in combination with direct action as a strategy for achieving their goals. To specify the kind of planning I have in mind, I follow Healey (1997:69), stating that: 'Spatial and environmental planning, understood relationally, becomes a practice of building a relational capacity which can address collective concerns about spatial co-existence, spatial organisation and the qualities of places'. Activist planners can contribute to the processes of such planning and help collect and form the input to spatial and environmental plans. ; publishedVersion

The article is about intentional communities choosing a lifestyle outside the mainstream. It is explained why their planning is a sort of activist planning and often a case of radical planning. Planning by intentional communities differs from most activist neighbourhood planning by closer relation to a deviating worldview or ideology. The permanent insistence on non-conformity makes planning processes involving both government and intentional community cases of agonist planning. Activist planning theory has not studied how the thousands of dedicated activists living in intentional communities plan the development of their area. The article starts such an investigation by studying Svartlamon in Trondheim, Norway. It is an urban intentional community for social change, housing some 240 individuals. The activists have used planning strategically to mobilize and build external support, to frame the cooperation with the municipality and to establish a legal underpinning of the intentional community. The following questions are answered: Are the goals of the activists clearly reflected in the plans? How are the activists involved in the planning? Are the planning ideas of the intentional community well received by the municipality?

The aim is to study how ideologies come through in urban regeneration plans. Neo-liberalism, participatory democracy and environmentalism are systems of ideas competing for the minds of citizens in large parts of the world. Typical urban policies linked to each ideology are listed to provide a basis for identifying features of development plans that reflect aspirations for an entrepreneurial, green or open and inclusive society. A case study from Trondheim, Norway, maps ideological traces in waterfront development plans. The central question to be addressed is whether the internationally widespread allegations of neo-liberal hegemony over urban plans are reasonable. In light of the case data, it can be questioned whether neo-liberal ideology, although influential, is hegemonic in the plans. This doubt lingers, even if the chosen case Nedre Elvehavn is the kind of large-scale transformation of former dockyards close to the central business district that is often regarded as prototypical neo-liberal development in academic planning literature.

Communicative planners are often criticized for lacking a credible strategy for dealing with biased power relations. The purpose of the article is to make it evident that critical communicative planning has a strategy for handling this problem. The logic of critical communicative planning (John Forester's 'critical pragmatism') is reformulated in terms of transaction cost politics. The critical planner counteracts systematically distorted communication by augmenting the transaction costs of those trying to influence the planned solution by leaning on their power base instead of the force of the better argument.Also, the critical planner aims to diminish the political transaction costs of deprived groups standing to lose from the results of power-based argumentation. The idea is to make it relatively more difficult to pursue special interests by means of repressive or manipulative strategies. Hence, the rationality of critical communicative planning rests on power management by deliberate alteration of political transaction costs. Analysis of 'network power' shows that the same chain of reasoning does not fit well for strongly consensus-seeking collaborative planning.

The almost utopian state in which most people behave as if they were footloose and fancy-free has the potential to bring about a situation where transport planning no longer relies on forecasts. The type of decision-making that is prevalent in a society depends upon the kinds of information available. In modern, Western-type democracies, it is taken for granted that well- informed planning and decision-making are grounded in the reliable prediction of impacts. Therefore, if unlimited mobility undermines predictability, it poses a threat to public planning and democratic governance in the transport sector. This exploratory and somewhat speculative essay about a possible future analyzes the planning consequences of the 'death-of-distance' literature. It seeks to clarify just how planning might be transformed by the loss of consequential impact analysis. It is moreover suggested that the likely responses to mobility-induced unpredictability – private rule following and public planning rituals – would challenge modernist ideals. ; The paper is published by the European Journal of Spatial Development (EJSD). The previous version of the journal was host by Nordregio.

The starting point is that the benefit/cost ratio is virtually uncorrelated to the likelihood of a Norwegian classified road project entering the list of investments selected for the National Transport Plan. The purpose of the article is to explain what pushes cost-benefit results into the background in the prioritization process. The reasons for their downgrading point to mechanisms that are at work not only in Norway. Explanatory factors are searched for in incentives for cost-ineffective action among planners, bureaucrats and national politicians, respectively, as well as in features of the planning process and the political system. New data are used to show that the road experts' list of prioritized projects changes little after submission to the national politicians, suggesting that the Norwegian Public Roads Administration puts little emphasis on its own cost-benefit calculations. Besides, it is shown that the petroleum revenues of the state do not provide a strong reason for neglecting costbenefit accounts. The overall contribution of the article is to offer a comprehensive explanation why professional and political authorities in Norway set road-building priorities diverging massively from those suggested by cost-benefit analysis. ; © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Most project impacts on environment, climate, and health are not valued in markets or in choice situations similar to market transactions. Analysts have to go beyond revealed preferences to stated preference interviews and even to deliberative processes in order to elicit preferences from which the trade-off values ('prices') of the expanded cost-benefit analysis (CBA) can be deduced. The comprehensiveness dilemma of social CBA arises with the choice between calculation of 'prices' from revealed preferences and communicative construction of 'prices' on the basis of preferences stated in deliberation. New methods for eliciting preferences, such as deliberative monetary valuation, yield preferences influenced by ethical and political values. The interpretation of the analytic results then becomes problematic. The comprehensiveness dilemma is that planners must choose between a narrow CBA making good economic sense, and a comprehensive CBA with dubious economic content. By aiming for completeness, CBA changes character from being a summation of changes in individual wellbeing to being a mix of this and the summation of monetary expressions of ethical and political viewpoints and attitudes. ; publishedVersion ; licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 3.0 .