Abstract
Looking back on 25 years of planning experience, the single most crucial planning component appears to me to be shared visioning. While the term ‘masterplanning’ still bears the hallmark of the visionary ‘masterplanner’, drawing lines to connect the dots of an expert-driven urbanistic utopia, the paper advocates multi-actor planning as alternative, guided by a shared vision and participatory planning process. The methodology of community-based visioning workshops in an early phase of a participatory planning process is far from new, yet it is still far from mainstream. Ongoing fragmentation of societies and science often result in fragmented or limited stakeholder involvement and an overly technocratic planning approach. A community-based planning approach however not only aspires territorial trade-offs between human and nature, between rich and poor, between men and women but rather a balanced win-win for all groups in society that can actively contribute to sustainable place-based development. Identifying and bringing together all place-based actors in a very early phase of a planning process is the best way to achieve a directional Shared Vision as a basis for more detailed planning, underpinned by shared global and local sustainability values. This is even more important for planning data- and capacity-poor countries and cities, mostly in the Global South. The paper will demonstrate this emancipatory planning methodology by showcasing recent community-based urban visioning and barefoot-planning capacity building in Hargeisa, Somaliland and Banjul, The Gambia. The two cases applied a similar community-visioning approach but were also quite different in terms of population size and political and institutional framework. Conclusions and recommendations will be made valid for place-based planning approaches all over the Global South and North. The methodology will be scrutinized in the light of the coronavirus pandemic health crisis, exploring options for complementing in-person with remote collaborative planning. Keywords: multi-actor planning, community-based visioning, capacity-building, barefootplanning, remote collaboration
