Contingency, decision, unfinished planning: let’s quarrel more!

Planning is politics. It is a procedural public participation and ladder of decision. Planning praxis is governmentalized through planning law and its procedures for communication and dialogue on decision-making and how to solve planning conflicts. It is a sedimented system (sectors) and vertical structured decisional system (top-down). Public planning is procedural (limited time for public dialogue and critique) and sedimented (organized forces first, next community). Planning is politicized in different ways: through discourse, plans, planner’s attention to political voices and space of dialogue ruled by politics and demands. This article discusses how to move from procedures to agonism or strife. Outlining some important contemporary studies on participation, including the debate on ‘good enough’ solutions, discussing the ideas of ‘temporary resting places’ and ‘strategic navigation’, this article introduces ‘the unfinished’ as a way of thinking and doing, and how a ‘de’-cisional mode of acting is responding to a praxis always ‘on the move’. The aim is, on one hand, to explore governmental modes of decision from a public participation perspective, and on the other hand, to point to the transformative potentials of working as temporary, navigating, from ‘solutions for now’, or better, unfinished.