The problem of trust in planning

Abstract

The paper reviews recent literature on trust in urban and regional planning from engineering planning, sociological, economic and psychoanalytic perspectives using the author’s training and experiences as a backdrop. It discusses the various approaches of defining trust in the planning context and discusses four categories of trust proposed by Swain and Tait (2007). According to the author, the importance of leaders and leadership on trust is ignored in most current theories. Based on Freud’s model on groups the author proposes that leaders and significant “external objects” are central to trust and critical to successful planning. Following the group model, supported by psychoanalytic literature, the paper proposes a new way of looking at trust, how it develops and how it can be adapted and incorporated in the planning processes.