The Participation Paradox and Infrastructure Planning: A Story About Gaslighting

ABSTRACT

Participatory planning exists as a paradox. In this paper, I draw from feminist and political philosophers writing on structural gaslighting to consider the paradoxical relationship between government commitments towards just planning and the increasing socio-spatial injustices that contemporary forms of participation can maintain within infrastructure planning. By exposing the structural gaslighting emerging inside infrastructure planning, my aim is to contribute to a conversation about enlarging the prefigurative possibilities for participation: that which is being performed at the edges of infrastructure planning and possessing the power to inspire hope for future practice.

参与式规划是一个悖论。在本文中，我借鉴了女权主义和政治哲学家撰写的关于结构性“煤气灯操纵”的文章，来考虑政府对公正规划的承诺与当代参与形式在基础设施规划中可能保持的日益严重的社会空间不公正之间的矛盾关系。通过揭露基础设施规划中出现的结构性“煤气灯操纵”，我的目标是为一场关于扩大参与的预先可能性的对话做出贡献。这是在基础建设规划的边缘进行的，并拥有激发未来实践希望的力量。

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• infrastructure
• planning
• urban politics
• gaslighting

1. Part 1: Vertigo

It is July 2018. A cold winter day in Naarm-Melbourne. I’m at the Melbourne Convention Centre located in Southbank for an infrastructure conference, which is one of those large industry gatherings where academics like me can mix with practitioners who are at the forefront of building future cities.

The brief I received was to present “Trends in engagement and results from research”; at least that’s how my presentation was advertised in the program. I was an invited presenter, and I was sharing the space with community engagement practitioners, and representatives from government and the private sector working in infrastructure planning.

Perhaps my mistake was departing from the invitation brief? This would be a rookie error that I would think twice before I do in future invited presentations!

Instead of talking about “best practice” trends, I presented a critical account of community engagement within large urban infrastructure planning, and how those trends are challenging commitments towards “democratic planning”. I titled my presentation “Who are we engaging for in infrastructure planning?”. Admittedly, I had only presented at a few industry conferences prior to this one. I was still early in my academic career and looking to my mentors at the time, I had come to interpret these invitations as opportunities to share, challenge, and provoke discussion within the profession.

In this 30 min presentation I shared my work on the West Gate Tunnel Project, which was a then $6.7B tollroad market-led project proposed for Melbourne’s inner-west, by Transurban who are a giant tollroad operator in Australia. I had been following this project since its announcement in 2015 which was the same year that saw the cancellation of the now infamous East West Link tollroad.

In applying a critical assessment of the way infrastructure planning and community engagement were now converging, I wanted to demonstrate how this evolution was in support of de-risking the delivery of big infrastructure. Public consultation was becoming an exercise in community management rather than about working alongside communities to create more climate just and inclusive cities and regions.

In this presentation I shared “five propositions” stemming from my research. My talk was aimed at creating a discussion about how to strengthen the role of public participation in a way that challenges the structural conditions that perpetuate exclusions in infrastructure planning, which can ultimately lead to unjust outcomes for communities.

When the presentation ended, lunch followed.

During lunch I was approached by a conference leader who proceeded to ask me, “Can I have a quick word with you?”. My heart rate sped up and, in this moment, I felt like I was being summoned by the school principal.

In this brief exchange I was strongly encouraged to speak to a fellow conference delegate from one of the infrastructure authorities who felt I had misrepresented infrastructure planning in the state of Victoria. Of course, I would oblige and when we met, the energy was friendly enough. I was open to the critique as I was looking to preserve the opportunity for connection and further dialogue.

Following that conversation, and because I needed a quick comfort break, I was late to my seat as the afternoon program commenced. As I entered the large room, the person who summoned me over lunch was on stage and they were addressing all delegates. What I heard next as I entered that room was this:

“I need to address some of the remarks delivered by Dr Legacy.” “She is an academic”, and “as community engagement professionals we know that everyone has an opinion, and everyone is entitled to it”.

In that moment I experienced a shock: what, my presentation was merely opinion? No. No … it was research! I was gutted, and I felt humiliated.

As I walked to my table, I felt shame, and I was dizzy. To get to my chair I focused on putting one foot in front of the next. My eyes fixated on the chair that was my destination. Navigating the sea of conference tables to find my seat time stood still as my legs turned to jelly. To get through this moment, I uttered to myself “just breathe, I’m ok”.

Each step towards that chair felt hard. In that moment I disassociated, and I was nothing more than a physical being seeking out a chair to sit on. I had no emotion, but of course, everything about that moment was heavy as I was thinking to myself, did I do something wrong? Was my presentation terrible? Was everyone now staring at me? I just wanted to disappear; sink down into that chair and vanish.

The experience I had on that cold July day in Naarm-Melbourne stays with me as a reminder of the hostility that is directed at anyone prepared to engage at the edges. In this instance, the edge was speaking about the paradox of participation in infrastructure planning as both a virtue and vice. The provocation I presented was simple: When participation is used to empower communities, it is a virtue; when it is used as a figleaf for an alliance of corporate and state power it can be a vice. Participation is good for planning, and it can be good for infrastructure delivery, but participatory planning is not always good for communities. I did not know it at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can now see more clearly that, in July 2018, what I experienced was a form of gaslighting. Feminist philosophers like Manne (2023) may describe the experience I had as a kind of structural gaslighting, a phenomenon that leads to the undermining of the authority of one person to protect the authority of a dominant person or institution.

I use this opening vignette as my point of entry into thinking about structural gaslighting and the role it plays in urban planning, and it is here that I need to recognise my positionality within this work. I am a white- settler, cis gender, able bodied, solo living, child free, middle-class woman, who has a continuing position at a University. I have privilege and a platform. While on one hand, I have limited authority to speak on the issue of gaslighting, on the other hand, I have lived experience as someone who has been systematically gaslit within my interpersonal relationships throughout my private life.

My engagement with structural gaslighting is to show how it can sideline justice-based planning practices embraced by those researchers, teachers, practitioners, and community leaders working from the edges of urban planning. However, given my background, I cannot speak to experiences of racial and cultural gaslighting that reinforce and perpetuate experiences of marginality, exclusion, and oppression of those whose struggles on the edges are also entwined with agency, joy and resurgence of people who are occupying different lived realities. It is important for me to acknowledge that my aim in this paper is strictly confined to the politics of professional practice and to draw from feminist philosophers writing on gaslighting to offer a structural analysis that may help illuminate what I see as a convergence between participation and big infrastructure, and to explore what that means for urban planning.

The examples I share are drawn from insights from research conducted with many colleagues over ten years on the politics of transport infrastructure planning and the politics of participation in Melbourne (Legacy 2016; 2017), Sydney (Searle and Legacy 2021), Vancouver (Legacy and Stone 2019) and Toronto (Legacy et al. 2023). More recently, that work has culminated in papers exploring the professionalisation of public participation (Barry and Legacy 2023), including its rise as an industry (Legacy et al. 2023), which is raising questions about how we teach participation in urban planning schools (Barry et al. 2024). With respect to the politics of infrastructure planning, research undertaken with colleagues has explored the use of regulatory instruments such as unsolicited proposals to consolidate the power of elite actors (Gibson et al. 2023), and the ongoing challenges for accountability experienced within urban infrastructure governance (Clements et al. 2024), and most recently how the changing politics of infrastructure planning and politics of public participation are setting the conditions for infrastructural gaslighting (Legacy et al. 2023); a concept that has connections with structural gaslighting, which I will explore below.

As a result of this work, I have been invited into many community-led spaces, and I continue to be inspired by the placed-based work of people living and working in these communities as activists and advocates participating in urban planning from the edges. I am deeply grateful for those opportunities to bring research and advocacy together in ways that can support community-led planning for climate just futures. For me, what those experiences reveal is a convergence occurring between infrastructure planning and participatory planning, the conditions under which are enabled by what can be called “the participatory planning paradox”.

2. Part 2: The Participatory Planning Paradox

Participation in planning has a politics, and that politics has a structure. Precisely, it is the embracing of participatory practices that showcases a commitment to quality, inclusivity and just-based planning thereby strengthening planning’s connection to the wider democratic project. It is also those same just-based practices that can be used to manipulate the community’s relationship with the state in ways that protect the interests of the more powerful, elite actors. In the context of infrastructure planning where elite networks of actors consolidate under hybrid governance arrangements (See Gibson et al. 2023), the power possessed by those occupying privileged access to the planning system is at risk of being unchallenged as new formal participatory spaces continue to develop within the boundaries of these structures. There is growing recognition that processes supporting infrastructure planning are being depoliticised through an increasing and well-documented case of post-politics in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Sydney (Legacy 2016, Haughton and McManus 2019). These cities are suffering from a post-political condition that seeks to protect the power of the state and its elite networks by dampening any possibility of political challenge from within and outside of the formal urban planning system.

The paradox that this post-political condition supports reflects what philosopher Berenstain (2020) calls structural gaslighting. In urban planning, we might see it as the paradoxical relationship between a government’s commitment towards more just planning processes that include community participation, which gets expressed in policies and rhetoric, and the increasing socio-spatial injustices that maintain the otherwise established socio-political order of winners and losers in infrastructure delivery. Scholars and advocates seeking to expand participatory planning see the potential it brings to infrastructure planning by supporting more inclusive cities and planning processes. Participation in planning will extend the sites available for the state and citizens to interact by creating “invited spaces”, as described by urban scholar Miraftab (2009); these are the sites where the state opens its doors for communities to participate in the planning decisions shaping their cities. Ostensibly, these sites also embody a promise: by participating you will contribute to the shaping of planning cultures and institutions in ways that reflect community values. These are ideas that are grounded in the work of Healey (1992), and it is a promise that has come to define the work of a generation of participatory planning scholars theorising that by enlarging the possibility for different kinds of community-based knowledge to inform planning, participatory planning can release us from the constraints of top-down, expert-led and technocratic decision-making. This ideal, in turn, makes cities more inclusive, just and democratic.

Herein lies the paradox of participation in planning. On one hand, participation is core to the creation of climate just and democratic cities. On the other hand, participation can also seed the production of social licences for infrastructure proponents seeking outcomes that are otherwise agnostic to the delivery of just, fair and inclusive places. Here we must gesture to the body of critical urban planning literature by scholars such as Huxley (2013), Huxley and Yiftachel (2000) and Porter (2014) who lament the stifling ways in which formal forms of participation perpetuate exclusions within planning systems. For Asenbaum (2023, p. 63), in his book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and democracy in the digital age, participatory forms of democracy possess the power to “produce particular subjects” that “in many ways … .are seen as a product, an object of creation, rather than an autonomous self-explorer” (Asenbaum 2023, p. 63 italics added). It is important to make a clear distinction here. Asenbaum is not refuting a claim made by Patsy Healey (1992, p. 249) where she described the virtue of participation as the possibility of “making sense together, while living differently” through which a democratic form of planning can be realised. We are interconnected, and our encounters with each other are vital to the building of mutual understanding, and this includes the processes involved in supporting the delivery of urban infrastructure. Rather, Asenbaum’s (2023) caution speaks to the capacities of participating publics to “show up” in these invited participatory spaces of planning as autonomous political subjects who can act politically in ways that result in challenges towards proposed infrastructure projects.

In other words, the infrastructure planning system demands a certain kind of participating person: someone who supports project delivery. To create a participating public that adheres to the terms of engagement as set by the formal planning system, their capacities for political transformation – as a person capable of acting politically and able to seed the conditions for a new politics of infrastructure planning – clear boundaries need to be set and they need to be respected by participating publics. To dampen such possibilities, participatory spaces are designed to reduce the scope for publics to engage authentically and on the terms they themselves are setting. As discussed below, their capacities to challenge or change the conditions for their future participation become reduced. The paradox of participation described here exists within an ever-evolving landscape of infrastructure regulation and approval, and that paradox is itself evolving through the myriad ways that infrastructure planning and public engagement interplay. To understand these dynamics, and how they impact communities, we need to become attuned to structural gaslighting as a contemporary condition of infrastructure planning.

3. Part 3: Structural Gaslighting & Political Transformation

People are typically familiar with the term gaslighting from contemporary social media and popular culture. It has its origins in the 1944 movie Gaslight. That movie is a psychological thriller that portrays a husband who uses the gas light in their furnace to manipulate his wife’s own perception of reality. In doing so the woman begins to believe that her sense of reality cannot be trusted and she begins to second guess her own instincts resulting in her losing a sense of her own self-autonomy.

At its core, and as described by Sweet (2019), gaslighting is a kind of mind-manipulation that draws on strategies and tactics that can be used to undermine the other person’s sense of reality thereby limiting their capacities to challenge authority. Broadening gaslighting and using it as an interpretative and analytical device to understand power’s structure, research into gaslighting is increasingly exploring how whole communities are gaslit through epistemic injustice. Recent literature on racial gaslighting by Davis and Ernst (2020), Ruíz (2020) and Sebring (2021) unearthed insights about gaslighting that reveal how it is commonly used as a strategy long associated with the reproduction in democratic societies of systemic domination in the form of colonial, racial, gender and class-based relations, to name but a few.

Structural gaslighting, as Berenstain (2020, p. 734) describes it, conceals, and further normalises the connections between oppression and what gives oppressors their licence to continue. In Berenstain’s words, structural gaslighting is,

any conceptual work that functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license. Individuals engage in structural gaslighting when they invoke epistemologies and ideologies of domination that actively disappear and obscure the actual causes, mechanisms, and effects of oppression.

When applied to planning, structural gaslighting casts attention onto how the conceptual work that participatory practices bring to infrastructure planning – its rhetorical promises of inclusive and deliberative engagement – can also help to conceal the composition of planning’s power by setting boundaries around the epistemologies of participation thereby limiting what kinds of knowledges get to count, and by extension what forms of participation are permitted. Importantly, the conceptual power of participation can be controlled by those in positions of privilege within existing urban planning systems, such as elite actors, who become the ones who are doing the boundary setting.

The relationship between gaslighting and the way power is structured through participatory planning is further revealed by Abramson (2014, p. 10) who claims that the central desire of the gaslighter is to limit challenges, which is achieved by “destroy[ing] even the possibility of disagreement” and maintaining those limits over time. Reducing any possibility of conflict is to eliminate the “source of possible disagreement”, and in doing so, limit the potential for any independent and “deliberative perspective” to emerge “from which disagreement might arise” (Abramson 2014, p. 10). Turning to the work of feminist philosopher Barnes (2023, p. 650), who writes on bioethics and health law, they describe gaslighting as “instances in which another person (or persons, institutions, etc.) imposes their own interpretation or narrative onto an individual’s experience”. This definition of structural gaslighting helps to underline how powerful these conceptual tools can be in perpetuating ableist, white, male, heteronormative, cisgender, patriarchal epistemologies. Their power comes both from the privileged position of elite actors and their increased capacity to set boundaries that help to maintain one way of knowing, for instance, what constitutes a good life, and likewise, their capacity to project that singular way of knowing onto someone else’s lived experience with the effect of altering how they know their own life.

To maintain their privileged position, structural gaslighting can secure the gaslighter’s position of authority and in doing so perpetuate an epistemic injustice where those with power determine what is known, while the gaslit are reduced in standing. But structural gaslighting does not stop there; it will also work to diminish the credibility of the gaslit to offer challenges or generative contributions into the future (Manne 2023). Understanding the capacity for structural gaslighting to protect and maintain existing power relationships will help to advance the long-standing critiques of participatory planning by showing how public engagement can be used by the powerful to gaslight communities. Participatory planning is both virtue and vice, and for urban planning to be able to harness its potential to serve communities, we must also expose the capacities of the gaslighters to use participation by leveraging its virtuous qualities to manipulate communities in ways that both suppress dissent and further reduce the capacities of those being gaslit from challenging power. In the section below, I turn to one of the conceptual tools used to frame participation in planning, and here I make the case that these tools can also conceal power relations and perpetuate injustices in infrastructure planning.

4. Part 4: Maintaining Participatory Planning’s Narrative

To instil doubt in one’s capacity to influence change is to shape their future participation. As Manne (2023, p. 142) aptly states, participating publics become “much more reluctant than they otherwise would be to challenge the prevailing narratives”. To reduce such challenges is to be able to control how those narratives are interpreted and critically assessed. As Bailey (2020, p. 668) asserts,

Power is maintained by closing off and eradicating alternative hermeneutical frameworks and forcing disenfranchised knowers to compete on the dominator’s epistemic home terrain, a world where it takes a great deal of epistemic labor and physical energy to endure.

To illustrate how structural gaslighting is shaping participation, we need to talk about the changing political economy of participatory planning and how this is limiting interpretive breadth, and reinforcing dominant socio-political relationships that are perpetuating winners and losers in the planning system. Here, I return to another example in Victoria where recent research (see Legacy et al. 2023, Barry et al. 2024) is showing a changing landscape for and within participatory planning.

Recently, the state of Victoria revised its Local Government Act 2020 to include a commitment to deliberative forms of participation. A potentially progressive act by the Labor State government to enshrine in legislation a commitment towards a style of participation that supports the giving of public testimony, which is to partake in reasoned deliberation, grounded in evidence-based argumentation. On one hand, deliberative participation supports dialogue from which mutual understanding, common ground and even a consensus decision is made possible. This is, after all, a core virtue of participatory planning. On the other hand, deliberative participation sets parameters around what a good deliberative citizen is; someone who is informed and can therefore engage productively within the invited spaces set by the planning system (see also, Inch 2015).

But what happens when the terms of that invitation are narrowed by those setting the parameters of participation? Taking signals from Asenbaum (2023, p. 64), we might say that there is an evaluative tone in how participation is described in the Victorian Legislation. To outline “quality” engagement in this way presents a risk for participating people, which for Asenbaum (2023, p. 65), is when,

Democratic spaces for deliberation are constructed with the purpose of producing “better” (empathetic, public-spirited, knowledgeable) citizens. Thus, democratic subjects are not free to change, but instead are subject to particular transformations designed by others.

We can see this evaluative tone when we examine the changing political economy of participatory planning in a state like Victoria where the enshrining of deliberative practice in Victorian legislation has not been an overnight occurrence. To understand this changing landscape, I turn to the rise and reach of an organisation called the International Association for Public Participation, or IAP2, in Australasia which has been the focus of research into the ways participation frameworks are shaping planning practice (Barry and Legacy 2023, Legacy et al. 2023, Barry et al. 2024).

The International Association for Public Participation was established in 1990 and it has grown in membership size serving more than 16,000 dues-paying members globally. The IAP2’s Spectrum communicates different levels of engagement that are meant to assist planners and public participation professionals with aligning different community engagement goals with the intended scope for community influence (Legacy et al. 2023, p. 2). Our research (Legacy et al. 2023) helps illuminate how the use of standards may bestow authority onto public engagement processes, and also create the conditions for participation to be “controlled” in other ways, for instance, through the rise of the Participatory Planning Industry which is at risk of narrowly serving the elite actor networks in an urban infrastructure governance environment that continues to be conditioned by post-politics.

Moreover, our research (Legacy et al. 2023, Barry et al. 2024) is also demonstrating that on one hand the deployment of participatory frameworks like the IAP2 spectrum may be creating a level of standardisation guiding public participation in planning processes that helps to support inclusive and deliberative public engagement. On the other hand, setting industry standards can also impose limits on those practitioners and communities seeking more diverse, creative or place-specific approaches to participation. While standards like the IAP2 offer the potential to support a shared language, they also possess the power to potentially narrow what gets counted as participation to only those spaces curated through an IAP2 framework. In other words, while the shared language may be raising the floor by setting clear expectations around different kinds of engagement practices, the managerial elements of participation may also be “lowering the ceiling” around what gets to count as participation (Legacy et al. 2023, pp. 13–14, Barry and Legacy 2023).

And there are more risks afoot. The rise of a Participatory Planning Industry can bifurcate participation from planning (Legacy et al. 2023). Rather than planners learning about participation in planning schools and then using those learnings in their future urban planning practice, participatory planning is also conducted by those practitioners who are trained in marketing and communications with little formal knowledge of urban planning. It can no longer be assumed that those who are designing and facilitating participatory spaces are urban planning practitioners. Knowing this is vital as we become more attuned to the ways structural gaslighting infuses participatory planning. Who is doing participatory planning, and who and what are being served by participation in planning are two questions requiring ongoing research, critical interrogation, and practice-based reflection as we continue to advance our understanding of the changing political economy of participatory planning and infrastructure planning.

The IAP2 provides one useful conceptual framework to guide participation. However, it is prudent to heed calls from philosophers like Berenstain (2020, p. 734) who set out how conceptual resources made available to us in practice can precipitate gaslighting. In other words, we must remain attuned to the ways conceptual tools like the IAP2 Spectrum can be mis-applied. It is through structural gaslighting that the “sabotaging of conceptual resources that might [otherwise help to] accurately theorize the nature of the oppression and promote resistance” become sites to both extend “wilful ignorance” (Berenstain 2020, p. 734) and be used to further destroy independent, deliberative perspectives upon which disagreement can arise (Abramson 2014). Conceptual tools like participation can help to obscure existing power structures and the processes that support them. Frameworks, like those offered by the IAP2, can impose boundaries around participation, and what is particularly problematic is how these boundaries can be translated into “terms of engagement” as set by those with the most power. Structural gaslighting occurs when power relationships are being obscured, and when boundaries are maintained in ways that reduce the capacities for different publics to wage challenges overtime. For infrastructure planning, structural gaslighting is a particular problem because the power differences between infrastructure proponents and communities tend to be the starkest, and the stakes for both parties can be the most high.

5. Part 5: Hope. Refusal. Hope.

I’m more than five years on from the experience I detailed at the start of this paper. My legs have stopped feeling like jelly long enough to ponder what to make of it all, and one thing is clear: while legislating deliberative forms of engagement, on one hand, is a welcome step towards recognising the role participation plays, we need spaces to critique who has power and how power is made and unmade within participatory planning spaces and processes. This critical work is important as we observe a changing political economy of participatory planning during a time when the embedding of public engagement practices within infrastructure planning seems to be perpetuating a focus on the de-risking of infrastructure delivery.

Following the events that led to the cancellation of the East West Link in Naarm-Melbourne, community engagement became a key strategy in the wider efforts to de-risk infrastructure planning. To achieve the latter, how participation is practiced needs to be managed. The presence of a Public Participation Industry and the convening of spaces like the industry conference I spoke at in 2018 converge in ways that are producing structural changes to the conditions of participatory planning. The changes we are witnessing have the potential to strengthen – rather than challenge – the positive feedback loop between participation and infrastructure planning, which also sets the stage for structural gaslighting to take root. Drawing structural gaslighting to the foreground in urban studies scholarship will allow researchers and practitioners alike to understand that there is a politics of participatory planning and that politics has a structure, and it is from here the profession needs to begin to ask itself, where can we find hope?

In helping me to answer this question, I turn to the work of Pohlhaus a feminist philosopher who published a paper in 2020 called “Gaslighting and Echoing, or why collective epistemic resistance is not a ‘Witch Hunt’”. Here they discuss the various strategies to reject the gaslighter on the terms as set by the gaslit. In essence, to disengage with the gaslighter – and to reject their way of knowing the world – is to step away from, and actively look towards possibilities for other ways of knowing. In Pohlhaus’ words,

refusing to engage, and calling upon others not to engage, in particular ways of thinking need not shut down; instead, it can be a call toward a different conversation.

It need not be a disengagement from thinking altogether, but a disengagement from one particular line of thinking and an invitation to engage epistemically in another.

For this reason, what appears to be disengagement from one perspective might also be characterized as animating new or different forms of engagement from another perspective.

Insofar as this in the case, resistant disengagements can call upon others to participate in more justly structured engagements. (Pohlhaus 2020, p. 676)

What Pohlhaus (2020) may be asking us to consider is how our work as scholars, educators, practitioners and community advocates can expose the politics of participation within an ever-changing regulatory landscape of infrastructure planning. This work includes understanding the emerging political economy of participatory planning, and in that work, joining communities to help actively seed alternative conditions that can open the spaces for different epistemic terms to emerge; importantly, these are the terms being set by those communities with the most at stake.

The work of seeding change needs to begin in our planning schools. How we teach participatory planning matters. If you are like me and you teach a subject on participation in an urban planning school, perhaps part of the work of casting attention onto the structure of participation’s politics is to move beyond the tools, instruments and activities of participation that take us away from thinking about the political context in which this practice occurs. Instead, we might move towards a more embodied experience of participation that makes real the stakes different communities face as vital to supporting empowered authentic dialogue that is locally situated and listens to the concerns of communities from the places where they speak. Perhaps one area ready for reform is the way participation is used to support infrastructure delivery, where we might extend participation into the spaces of project assessment; that which occurs prior to investments and promises of infrastructure delivery being made.

Taking this line of argumentation one step further, work needs to be directed at refusing infrastructure planning’s status quo, and the building understanding of the conditions supporting the post-politics of infrastructure governance. One such condition is the existing environmental assessment processes that restrict community dialogue about projects and set boundaries around the ways those dialogues occur allowing elite actors to continue to gain privileged positions within urban planning systems. In other words, planning scholars and practitioners seeking different conditions for their work may start to name and then begin to refuse the influence infrastructure proponents have over regulatory environments, narratives and ways of knowing that allow them to protect their power. To do this work requires courage, and the building of community, scholarly and professional capacities to call out structural gaslighting as we see it in our collective practice. It demands that we be alert to the ways participatory planning conceals the positive feedback loop of structural gaslighting in which communities are drawn into co-dependent relationships with the state and infrastructure authorities in ways that can be toxic.

What motivates me in this work is naming the conditions of structural gaslighting and making them visible. In doing so, I am joining many other scholars across critical urban studies, as well as many practitioners and communities in their efforts to locate radical participatory spaces, processes and epistemologies that invite new transformative and prefigurative possibilities that empower diverse communities rather than diminish them. This is more than just finding new ways of doing participation within infrastructure planning; it is about changing the very essence of participatory planning including what work it is doing, and who is establishing its grounding. At its core, it is about moving away from the instrumental, the commodified and the commercial, and moving towards an embodied social, cultural and political practice of participatory planning and urban infrastructure governance that is grounded in the relationships that are nested in place and connected through time.

Acknowledgements

This paper was delivered as the Pat Troy Memorial Lecture at the State of Australasian Cities (SOAC) Conference in Poneke-Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand in December 2023. I want to extend my gratitude to Chris Gibson, Libby Porter, Wendy Steele and Matt Novacevski who all read earlier versions of this paper, to the Indigenous Caucus and the Local Organising Committee for the invitation, and to the audience at SOAC who held the space allowing me to deliver the address. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers who made really insightful comments allowing me to substantially improve the paper for publication.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.