Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem
Planning is expected to contribute to solutions for the polycrisis, yet planning is itself widely diagnosed as being in crisis (Davoudi, 2023). Professional and public trust has declined, and the field is criticised for failing to produce sufficient positive change (Albrechts, 2015; Rydin, 2013). Democratisation figures ambiguously in this diagnosis: the erosion of legitimacy is a core dimension of the crisis, while more democratic practice is simultaneously proposed as a condition for planning to become transformative again. Planning authorities worldwide have accordingly raised their democratisation ambitions, but these ambitions repeatedly stall.
Amsterdam no exception. The municipality has formulated an explicit democratisation agenda in the realm of planning, articulated through the Environmental Vision 2050 and the participation ordinance, and operationalised in the programme City-making Together (Samen Stadmaken). The agenda responds to three self-diagnosed problems: declining local legitimacy and electoral participation, a diminished sense of belonging in a rapidly transforming built environment, and affordability pressures driven by global capital seeking returns in the city (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2021). It rests on two normative premises: that residents' interests, ideas and knowledge should be valued at least equally to those of developers, corporations and landowners, and that residents should experience greater ownership of the city's physical development.
This is the espoused theory of the agenda. Our question concerns its theory-in-use (Argyris & Schön, 1974): what happens to a democratisation agenda once it enters the everyday working life of planners, most of which is spent not with citizens but with each other, behind closed doors? We ask: How do planners discursively define the democratisation agenda of Amsterdam through their everyday practices?
Conceptual framework
The paper builds on scholarship that treats planning as practice rather than doctrine — "there is no planning, only planning practices" (Alexander, 2016, p. 91) — and on the empirical tradition running from Schön & DeSanctis (1986) and Healey (1992) through Forester (1982) and Majoor (2018). Much prescriptive participation scholarship, from the ladder (Arnstein, 1969) to the cube (Fung, 2006), theorises how state–citizen relations should be shaped; far less attention is paid to how they are shaped, among officials themselves.
To access this upstream work we adapt the public administration concept of public encounters — the multifaceted, situated, relational interactions in which professionals and citizens make claims and influence decisions (Bartels, 2013; Samanta & Hand, 2022) — into what we call bureaucratic encounters: face-to-face interactions between public planning professionals in non-public settings, where courses of action are negotiated, policies framed, and beliefs shared. The shift is from state–citizen to state–state relations, and it takes the encounter itself as the unit of analysis. The move responds to Forester's (2006) warning against over-abstraction and his call to "look and see", and it retains two virtues of the public encounters lens: it recasts the place of politics, power and emotion in administrative work, and it dissolves the politics/administration dichotomy, showing officials as creative and discretionary rather than Weberian clerks (Hupe et al., 2022).
Within these encounters we analyse discretion — choosing what to do, decide or argue for where multiple alternatives arise (Mandelbaum, 1996) — and role conceptions: how professionals understand their work and their societal function in terms morally acceptable to profession and public (Von den Driesch & Van der Wurff, 2016). Because democratic governance is decentred, emerging from competing actors, practices and beliefs (Griggs et al., 2014), the bureaucratic encounter is precisely where a transition pathway is narrowed or widened.
Methods
The study rests on immersive, insider fieldwork conducted by the first author in his capacity as a planner at the City of Amsterdam, working on City-making Together strategies. Eight bureaucratic encounters — strategy sessions, coordination meetings, video calls, an internal debate, an informal lunch — were reconstructed as analytical vignettes from field notes, and subsequently triangulated through reflective follow-up interviews with participants in those same encounters. This design allows the encounter to be read twice: as it unfolded, and as participants retrospectively account for it.
Results
Across the eight encounters, three recurring discursive repertoires emerge through which planners define the democratisation agenda in practice.
Neutrality: Officials position themselves as apolitical analysts, explicitly refusing to "politicise" densification options, deferring ideological questions to after-hours ("a fantastic topic over a beer, but not during working hours"), and treating advocacy on behalf of less powerful communities as suspect activism. Residents' knowledge is neutralised by discursively offsetting it against the interests of absent others, such as households unable to find housing.
Control: Participation is reframed as a risk-management device — one adviser describes it as a "control measure" that puts residents "in the pocket". Engagement is deferred until plans are no longer "vague", mandates are internally settled, and financial feasibility is secured; the land exploitation account method migrates from decision-support tool to decision-making instrument, foreclosing options on financial grounds.
Directionlessness: Managers allow policy ambiguity to persist, avoiding complexity rather than steering through it. Meetings close without conclusions or assignments; ambitions are simultaneously affirmed in vision documents and treated as optional. The result is fragmented governance and demotivated professionals who no longer know what is expected of them.
Discussion and conclusion
Read together, these repertoires and experiences describe post-politics at work: disagreement is displaced from the political register into technical, procedural and financial argumentation, and the democratisation agenda is absorbed without being enacted. The contribution is twofold. Conceptually, bureaucratic encounters open the institutional black box of planning organisations and show where and how transition pathways are actually narrowed. Substantively, the findings speak to the track's central concern with the boundary between transitions and transformations: uncertainty here is not held open as a space for experimentation but is actively closed down, through attitudes of neutrality, control and the absence of direction. Instead of building toward deeper institutional change, these small closures accumulate into the opposite outcome: an democratisation agenda that survives on paper but not in practice. This suggests that the fate of democratisation is decided earlier than usually assumed: not primarily in the interface between planners and citizens, but already in the bureaucratic encounters among planners that precede and shape that interface.
References
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