Patsy Healey

Patsy Healey, professor emerita at Newcastle University, is the central figure of the communicative turn in planning theory, alongside John Forester and Judith Innes. Against the post-war rational model, in which the expert planner decided the optimal use of land, Healey argued from the 1980s that planning is a social process in which many actors, with different interests and knowledge, have to reach agreements about the place they share, and that the quality of a plan depends on the quality of that conversation.

Collaborative Planning (1997) is her main work. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action and Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, it proposes an institutionalist planning: what matters is not only the drawings but the networks, routines and power relations through which decisions are made, and the planner's task is to open those processes, make interests visible and build institutional capacity so that agreements last.

In Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies (2007) she studied how Amsterdam, Milan and Cambridge drew up spatial strategies in fragmented societies, and in Making Better Places (2010) she defended the planning project as a form of public action aimed at the quality of places. Her critics, from Bent Flyvbjerg to Marxist planners, reproach her for underestimating power and assuming that dialogue is enough; she answers that dialogue is where power becomes visible and is contested. She is one of the most cited theorists in the discipline.

Her theory grew out of empirical research. In Land Use Planning and the Mediation of Urban Change (1988), written with colleagues at Oxford Polytechnic, she studied how local plans were actually made in England and showed that a plan does not fix a future but mediates between conflicting interests: developers, residents, public bodies and lobbies. From that observation came her idea that the quality of a plan depends on who sits at the table and on what terms.