Should planning and policy gather around the concept of “community of disagreement”?

Abstract

The planning field tends to have consensus building as a guiding inspiration. Politics, on the other hand, is an activity characterised by disagreement and competition over ideology, values, knowledge, and planning solutions.

Since, or if, we in the planning field today are concerned with giving politicians a leading position, we must recognise the need for politicians to highlight disagreement. Only then will planning become a tool for political governance and for strengthen democracy.

We will in this paper present some main positions in the field of planning theory regarding handling professional and political disagreements, and then introduce the concept «communities of disagreement», as it is defined and discussed in the book Communities of disagreement: perspectives on democratic interaction (Iversen, 2014).