Call For Papers - Planning as a collaborative act / the plan as a collaborative actor - IPA2012 Tilburg 5-7 July

Colleagues Janice Barry, Andy Inch and myself have pulled together the following panel for the International Interpretive Policy Analysis conference in Tilburg at the start of July. IPA is a great conference - this will be my fourth - very friendly and welcoming with some very interesting work. The journal Critical Policy Studies is aligned with the conference.

Spatial plans can be understood as both a representation of complex urban and regional phenomenon and relationships, and as a reflection of the deliberative process through which different governance actors animate desires, make sense of different interests, and come to make decisions. This panel takes as its starting point this notion of spatial planning practice as an interpretive act. A key question the panel will explore is how plans should be conceptualised as documents: as expressions of clear principles, or as sedimented conflicts and compromises, and how the act of ‘publication’ or ‘adoption’ can obscure the contingency inherent to their production. Further, we seek to extend existing work by focusing on how the interpretations embedded in existing spatial plans are brought into being and themselves become actors in the collaborative process.

We are seeking papers for a themed panel session at the Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference, Tilburg 5-7 July.

We invite papers that focus on the political work that plans do and that critically analyse:

• A plan, or group of plans, that represent and interpret a particular place and how it has changed and reacted to the plan as actor over time;
• A plan, or group of plans that embody and signify a particular planning culture or epoch in plan-making;
• A plan, or groups of plan that are suggestive of differences in place, place-making and/or planning culture.

Abstracts can be submitted through the conference website at www.ipa2012.org