Collaborative Planning in a Complex Local Context

Abstract

This article undertakes a case study analysis of an Islamic school development application in Sydney, Australia. Discourse analysis situates collaborative planning within a realized sociopolitical context that impacts on the possibilities for this form of action. It reveals that planners and residents understood public participation as a measure of the legitimacy of the planning process, as a means to uncover local knowledge, and as an indicator of communication and collaboration. However, highly uneven networks of power found in actual practice as well as deep-seated anxieties about ethnoreligious “others” actively excluded supporters of the Islamic school from participation.