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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent resource for communicative planning
Review: Healey's challenge is to create understandings of the social construction of meaning and the social embeddedness of ways of acting and thinking to be tied with understandings of the wider forces affecting urban regions and governance. Collaborative Planning, while still purporting to address the failings of Modern planning, seeks to address the difficulties of undertaking collective action in a world where fact and value cannot be separated, by using an institutional approach which pays heed to the cultural embeddedness of individuals, and the social construction of meaning. Through policy discourse, the institutional capacity of a place can be 'built up'. Planning then, has the potential to shape the building of relations and discourse. An institutional approach would not measure success via assessment of outcomes against goals, but would also look at the institutional capacity generated by the process. All stakeholders are part of the dialogue. Collaborative Planning sees 'the problem' as essentially being: the changing dynamics of the way we live, global economics, bringing the views of all stakeholders together in a way that recognises power structures, and the role that planning might play in resolving these. Overall, the book is an excellent starting point for the critical exploration of communicative planning and the governance of urban regions. The book successfully synthesizes practical understandings of urban dynamics with a critique informed by a sound philosophical and political basis. I strongly recommend it, especially to the student and practitioner of urban planning and related fields.
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