Relating Past, Present, and Future: The Role of Material Representations in Reflective and Deliberative Practice

This paper examines the relationship between reflection, deliberation, and negotiation in the everyday work of planners and front-line practitioners involved in policy implementation. In analyzing their work, we build on an insight from the study of policy conflicts where, somewhat counter-intuitively, it is often the specificity and tangibility with which actions highlight stakes that draws citizens (and other stakeholders) into a case and sustains their engagement and commitment to confront the questions about local action, and also about fairness and the future, that are raised. In their work, these practitioners must take problems as they come—tied to things that happened in the past and to things that are happening in the present. We focus on the representations that get made in this work—whether a map of a river basin that combines folk art, local history, and technical information, a memorial to a building that will be razed for redevelopment, or a dramatization of the history of a conflict—and how these representations shape the ability of the stakeholders who are involved to engage the past, to relate to the “community of fate” (Erikson) with whom they share the present, and to confront the shadow cast by the future. We analyze how the ability to relate to others, to reflect on beliefs and commitments, to deliberate over the technical and moral questions raised, and to engage in the improvisations that practical negotiation requires is shaped by material forms that representation takes. Empirically, we draw on practitioners’ accounts of planning and policy implementation in complex cases of regional planning and urban development that are marked by controversy and contestation.