Trust and the Public Interest in the Micropolitics of Planning Practice

Abstract

In neoliberal democracies, regulatory planning systems are often characterized by tension between (1) efforts to treat developers as consumers and (2) the regulatory aspect of planning, frequently involving decisions that sacrifice individual interests in favor of a collective but ill-defined “public interest.” This unresolved tension creates a crisis of trust, as the underlying values of the planning system are rarely made explicit. Using an ethnographic methodology to investigate the embedded nature of trust relationships in one planning office, this article suggests that the prerequisite for invigorating trust in planning is a careful and coherent theorization of the relationship of individual to collective interests.

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