Reframing Participatory Planning: Trading Zones and Boundary Objects as practical tools for experiencing Critical Pragmatism and Agonistic Pluralism

The aim of this paper is dealing with the fragile relationship between planning theories and practices and it has the ambition to tackle the issue of participation in planning, offering a new theoretical framework to orient practices, by drawing on the Theory of Trading Zone and Boundary Objects and on Chantal Mouffe “agonistic democracy”. Since I have been working on and observing at various collaborative and deliberative processes between Turin and Boston, I have had the chance to enter the “black-boxes” (Latour, 1998) of methods, techniques and institutional structures for participatory decision-making processes in territorial planning and I also reflected upon how interactions work and how meanings and projects are produced in multi-actor contexts. A new consciousness developed during these studies, concerning with how twisting ideological premises in theory can really invalidate practices, has generated in my work critical questions about the validity of the deliberative tradition in it-self, in terms of political view and models for action. The paper, in fact, explores in his first part the contemporary debate around deliberative practices, dealing with “effectiveness” and “legitimacy”, as pivotal principles of the participatory approach. At the same time, it offers, as interesting perspectives to be explored in practice, pragmatical reasoning paths for planning, as much as sociology of science and cognitive psychology as theoretical models for reading multi-actor designing contexts. In order to test those new theoretical frameworks, I will try to describe a typical collaborative planning process about land-use regulation in Boston, the Copley Place Extension Project, by implementing Trading Zone and Boundary Objects frameworks, as pragmatical action models for understanding cognitive exchanges in pluri-logical action contexts. In particular, I would argue that bringing a critical-pragmatic perspective in collaborative planning would be the most effective way for escaping from the ideological drift of deliberative and collaborative practices, whose consensual perspective has blurt its focus on producing plural projects for urban development. Indeed, also because of the flourishing critical literature, which have risen those kind of questions, I have been reflecting upon how to readdress planning theory and practice on being focused on “contents” of planning activity, while preserving the pluralistic perspective embedded in participatory approaches to planning, in a broader conception of complex society, shaped by diverse interest-groups, conflicting agonistically (Mouffe, 2000). In this path, critical pragmatism allows to assume a “designing“ perspective for plural planning (Crosta, 2011), that, according to the “reflective practitioner” scheme, needs to be structured as an open conversation, a generative interaction with the context and the problematic situation (Schon, 1983). As being a design activity, at the same time reflexive, creative, collective and pragmatical, problem-setting in planning practice becomes the key phase for defining the most effective and coherent solution. Therefore, public participation could be considered as a collective inquiry tool, addressed to problem-framing definition, where conceptions such as Boundary Objects or Trading Zones become necessary to interpret how the all collective designing process could develop into a radical pluralistic and “agononistic” interactive contexts.