Building trust in planning professionals: understanding the contested legitimacy of a planning decision

摘要

This paper addresses the issue of trust as it occurs in the 'professional' decision-making spaces of local government. It does so by examining a proposal to develop an inner-city site into housing and the decisions associated with this. Findings reveal that trust is built and destroyed not only through interpersonal relations between actors, but also through institutional considerations which allow for trust to be held in planning systems and in the values of such a system. The role of professionals in negotiating between individual relationships and institutional contexts is crucial to understanding how legitimacy is built in the planning system.