Engaging the public in planning processes carries a dominant narrative that the development of understanding among interests and the garnering of knowledge from communities about their needs and preferences is a positive good. It is common therefore to hear exhortations about engineering supportive institutional arrangements and sensibilities in planning systems and how these are a necessary element for a legitimate planning. Thus, while arguments over the general principle of participation have largely been settled, what remains are a range of questions over how to effect public participation, on what basis and what to do about the competing knowledge claims and futures generated by wider engagement in planning, that is, questions of resolution. As such this topic area, which may be characterised as part of the empowerment agenda, has generated a huge amount of interest given that it strikes at the core of not only planning processes but of who determines the substantive goals of planning. A rich vein of research and analysis from the academy and agendas from numerous governments has spanned the period from the early 1970s until the present. Across that period key motifs of techniques, degrees of empowerment and collaboration, the role of the professional planner and how to respond to a more fragmented and fluid society, feature prominently.

The more radical or systemic responses to the empowerment agenda are borne out of a long-running search for ways to ‘emancipate communities’ (MacDonald, 2014; Matthews, 2013) and ensure that planning becomes a more inclusive process. Some efforts have claimed to redress issues of exclusion and widen access to planning while other mainstream forms and changes have been little more than tokenistic in their execution, with consultation and shallow engagement acting as much to justify professional plans and individual schemes as to actually shape them. Clearly one of the defining features of a legitimate town planning in the twenty-first century involves a process whereby consideration of different interests and competing arguments about the future are aired and decided. This, it is assumed, should be based on robust and diverse evidence and couched in terms of realistic, deliverable policy.

This simplistic description of planning and engagement of course belies a complex and open task; one that is made ever more challenging in a diverse and changing social, technological and economic environment.