Citizen Participation Through Communicative Action: Towards a New Framework and Synthesis

The paper addresses public involvement in transport planning and introduces the concepts of communicative action to buttress and complement technical rationality, currently used in the transport planning process. A real-life case study is presented to demonstrate how communicative action was successfully used in a problem-ridden planning situation.

Validity claims as suggested by Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action are used in this case study. It is concluded that academic institutions as well as planning agencies will have to make a concerted effort to educate and train planners not only to be involved with the engineering of our infrastructure, but also to be equally concerned with coping with the social, economic and political dimensions of planning.