Collaborative planning in practice: The Nicosia master plan

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Ann Dennett and Trevor Clark for their support while writing this paper. Thanks go also to the referees for their useful comments on early submissions.

Notes

1. It should be noted that there are significant ideological variations within this body of theory.

2. Innes's work is not included in the paper. While her work is useful in identifying the factors affecting the social learning process in communicative planning, her work seems not to be related to the power relations characterising planning in practice and to be questionable in the views of other researchers (see, for example, Tewdwr-Jones & Thomas, 1998; Hillier, 2000).

3. According to Goffman (1959), dramaturgical action is a social term which describes the presentation of self to others, by constituting a particular behaviour or image. This involves strategic behaviour in which individuals attempt to hide particular views or employ deceptive means to achieve desired outcomes.

4. The ability of individuals to make a change is what Habermas, after Hannah Arendt, calls power (see Habermas, 1979). What is taken to be true and right, Habermas argues is in the ‘force of the better argument’. In this book Habermas also developed his concept of the ‘ideal speech situation’ in which power and inequality can be set aside, at least temporarily. However, Habermas's utopian philosophy of the ideal speech has been heavily criticised; see, for example, Flyvbjerg (1998), and Owen (1996).

5. Prior to 1974, urban planning in Nicosia was undertaken according to the Streets and Buildings Regulations of 1946. Following independence in 1960, a planning study of Nicosia, after consultations with experts from the University of Nottingham (UK), was prepared in 1968 based on the Town and Country Planning Bill, modelled mainly on the British Planning Act of 1968. The Greek Cypriots enacted the 1968 Bill into a planning law in 1972, but never implemented it until December 1990 in the south. In northern Cyprus, sources interviewed explained that antiquities regulations, land allocation and Streets and Buildings Regulations law were in existence. They added that a planning law in the north based on the British planning system of 1968 came into force in 1989 when enacted and approved by the parliament.