Planning stories: When a small place faces ‘green’ mega-projects

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of planning rationales in a so-called ‘left-behind place’ confronted with the opportunities and challenges posed by a ‘green’ mega-project. Through an exploration of the planning stories articulated by planners and policymakers in interviews, and formal planning narratives found in official statements and documents, this analysis uncovers how planning is spatially situated and entangled with configurations of agency, power, and contested understandings of needs and problems. Drawing on Throgmorton’s (2003) conception of planning as a form of persuasive storytelling, and Sandercock’s (2003) emphasis on the emotional and political dimensions of planning stories, the study highlights how these stories are not merely descriptive but actively shape planning outcomes and what is seen as possible and desirable. The empirical findings underscore the fragility of planning narratives grounded in entrepreneurial logics, which often limit planning’s capacity for imagining and pursuing futures beyond corporate interests. Building on critiques of urban boosterism and place marketing, the article argues for planning stories that make space for municipalities and citizens to articulate structural inequalities and everyday struggles. It calls for planning stories and narratives that hold global firms accountable and foreground the material and social resources at stake—people, ecosystems, infrastructure, and welfare. Without such stories, planning risks reproducing spatial inequalities and perpetuating neocolonial patterns of uneven development.