The aim of this paper is to examine how the postpolitical era of planning has created both binaries and intersections in the reimaging of transport futures and how the latter precipitates a redefinition of democratic transport prioritisation. Focusing particularly on the point in the transport planning process when urban transport priorities are identified, the paper explores how citizens respond to the inherently political, yet not always democratic, aspects of setting transport investment priorities. This relationship is investigated through a single case study of Melbourne, Australia where a six km inner city road tunnel was deemed a ‘done deal’ by elected officials in the lead up to a state election, removing the controversial project from open public scrutiny. Drawing upon ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with community campaigners opposing the proposed East West Link road tunnel, this analysis reveals how community-based groups and individual residents alike can evolve beyond NIMBY-focused agitation to garner a spatially dispersed re-politicisation of urban transport priorities. While the postpolitical framing of infrastructure delivery introduces a binary between state interventionist planning and citizen opposition, it is the mobilisation of action through the spaces of intersection where new political paradigms for transport planning are created.

The critical literature on participation warns that a focus on ‘consensus’ evades the political in planning, preventing citizens from confronting and challenging discourse and prevailing orthodoxy about the way the urban ought to be constituted. These critiques raise important questions about the efficacy of participatory planning and its political formation. Moreover, the extent to which citizen’s participation can ever challenge dominant trajectories has reached a point of conceptual ‘crisis’. In this article, I explore the different ways in which participation manifests from the politicising participatory moments in planning. Examining a single case study in Melbourne, Australia, I draw upon 15 key informant interviews with community campaigners who mounted a successful campaign to defeat the controversial East West Link road project. By examining the formal and informal political manifestations of participation over a period of 2 years, this article challenges the sentiment that there is a crisis of participatory planning. It shows how decisions to engage the citizenry in prescribed ways induce other manifestations and formations of citizen’s participation through politics and how these manifestations garner a pervasive and influential trajectory to reshape participatory planning.

AV technologies have the potential to transform urban landscapes and existing transport systems and networks. Yet, the utopian imaginary of reduced automobile ownership and a new shared economic future sits in tension with suggestions that car dependency, urban sprawl and transport inaccessibility will be exacerbated. The issues are situated in a complex governance landscape involving an influential private sector who are increasingly setting the agenda. The public sector may be forced into reacting to the new innovations by information technology and automobile companies as they are introduced into existing built environments. Drawing on an extensive literature base and interviews with public sector planners, this paper reveals the conceptual gaps in the framing of AV technology-the prospects and limits-and how these are conceived. The paper raises questions about the role urban planning can play in the rollout of AVs in order to anticipate and mediate unwanted built environment and socio-spatial impacts, as well as reconciling the ambition of transport innovation with the public purpose of planning.

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The practice of metropolitan planning manifests a tension between the need for immediate implementation of policies that create cities that are less carbon dependent, can manage urban population growth, and satisfy the need for legitimate policy decisions. The question this raises is how can a decision-making process be designed in such a way that supports a more implementable policy outcome? This tension is played out in the decision-making discourse and is related in the literature on process design. The tension described here suggests that unresolved challenges exist regarding how to design and incorporate community engagement into a process of plan-making when these processes still resemble the expert-driven, rational comprehensive approach. Generally, contemporary metropolitan plan-making processes embrace the rational comprehensive planning structure whereby problems are identified, scenarios are selected and then examined, a decision is made, and implementation of that decision follows (Friedmann, 1987, page 36). The challenge then becomes about ensuring that the voices of the public actually influence the content of the plan while ensuring that this plan is ultimately implementable.The introduction of communicative processes to metropolitan planning reinforces the tension between making a decision and engaging widely on the formulation of that decision (March and Low, 2004). Deliberative democracy theory, which has emerged from within political theory and sociology, articulates the importance of inclusive and open engagement (Dryzek, 1990;Smith, 2003). The perspective that emerges from political theory describes deliberative democracy as producing policy decisions using a consensus-based approach (Habermas, 1990, page 76). By contrast, the sociological perspective emphasizes its social learning qualities (Barry, 1999;Eckersley, 2000;. By marrying these two perspectives, it is thought that the incorporation of the deliberative democratic ideal into urban planning will produce policy decisions that

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This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.

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