- Collaborative Planning: an evolving model of practice   776 kb by    Heywood, Phil | p.heywood@qut.edu.au    Short Outline As individuals, groups and activities are brought into ever-closer contact by radical developments in communication, opportunities for both conflicts and cooperation multiply. Making use of examples, this paper examines the role, scope and methods of collaborative planning as a means to build better futures in times of rapid change. Abstract Context: New models of planning are needed to match the expanding technological capacities of rapidly developing global and personal communications. As universal access to information of the Internet and the instantaneous responses of social media combine to expand the bounds of communities, they bring previously separate groups and activities into immediate contact and potential conflict. As a result, both opportunities and demands for collaboration are dramatically increased (Forester, 2009) Politicians, planners and activists are becoming increasingly aware of the impact that different, formerly specialised, fields of endeavour exert on each other. The achievement of beneficial change becomes dependent on establishing sensitive links between the four concerns of community development, productive activities, economic sectors, and different scales of government, making consensus among them, or at least mutual understanding, a necessity. Because collaboration is the most effective path to these outcomes, its role in planning settlements and their major activities becomes essential (Healey, 2006, 2007). The major activities of housing, public space and natural environment have been selected to illustrate examples and achievements of collaborative planning. Because all planning aims to shape outcomes, it must mirror and match the evolving forms, features and relationships of the wide range of current and emerging activities. Methods of collaboration include comprehensive and innovative consultation; inclusive objective setting; exploratory action research; multiple criteria policy formulation & evaluation; and composite, participatory implementation (Heywood, 2011). This paper considers these opportunities by making reference to international and local Brisbane examples of collaborative successes in each of the selected fields of housing, public space, and natural environment. Delegates may choose to visit some of these local examples themselves if they are staying in Brisbane for a few days after the congress: South Bank Gardens provide one interesting example adjacent to the conference venue; the Norman Creek Common and conservation corridor at Stones Corner is also within ten minutes travel by Brisbane’s excellent Eastern Busway. The paper concludes that collaboration can spread widely to transform brittle and narrow structures of command and control. Cooperative ecologies can recognise not only the need for sustainable relations of mutual care and concern between different groups of people, but also the inter- dependence of species and habitats (Midgley, 2006). References Forester, J. (2009) Dealing with Differences , Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Healey, P. (2006) Collaborative Planning, Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies (2nd Edition), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan Healey, P. (2007) Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies, Abingdon, Routledge. Heywood, P (2011) Community Planning: Integrating social & physical environments, Chichester, Wiley/Blackwell. Midgley M. (2006) Science and Poetry, Abingdon, Routledge Classics Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper