DefinePK

Abstract

Growing criticisms of planning systems and their failures have cast an atmosphere of urgent recall for practitioners and scholars of the 'planning project' 1 Most glaring of these failures have been the (increasingly pronounced) instances of socio-economic, spatial, and political marginalization and fragmentation that have emerged in cities across the developing world. These crevices of contradiction created by a longwinded bureaucratic promise of development have created a need for newer hybrid models of planning and governance. This paper examines the theoretical underpinnings of 'Collaborative Planning' as one such model of governance hybridity in cities. The mechanisms of Collaborative Planning are outlined herein and briefly analyzed using the example of the Pakistani city of Lahore. The paper aims to highlight the opportunities for transparency and inclusivity within Collaborative Planning approaches and attempts to identify the various manifestations they can take in a developing city. While Collaborative Planning permits the navigation of effective systems of multi stakeholder governance and the potential creation of a networked urban consciousness (Healey, 2010; Innes and Booher, 2002), this research finds that it is entirely dependent on localized socio-political realities.