In the last decades, citizen initiatives have become more important for neighbourhood development.
This applies as well to sustaining urban green and the (temporary) development of urban food
gardening and small parks. Development through citizen initiatives is not a straight-forward task for
planners as it means a new way of planning and legitimizing of planning decisions. Although citizen
initiative and involvement in planning has gained much attention in planning practice in the last
decades, planners still struggle with it. Citizen and entrepreneurial initiators of land-use projects for
green and urban farming also have difficulty to understand the process of project approval or denial.
Following the analysis of Schatz and Roberts (2016) of an ‘untenable governance ménage à trois’ of
relational, participatory and neoliberal planning, it seems that in bottom-up planning three types of
planning come together: technocratic, deliberative, and neoliberal. This makes the current struggles
of planners and initiators involved in bottom-up spatial planning no surprise.
In this paper we explore, based on a literature review, ingredients for a tool that could help
professional planners (civil servants) and initiators to better understand each other and the planning
process and improve the substantive discussion on land-use initiatives and in this way the
accountability, credibility and thus, legitimacy of decision. To come to our list of ingredients, we take
inspiration from the work of Mouffe and others who have stressed the conflicting views and interests
involved in any policy issue. Taking her ‘agonistic approach’ to policy-making we aim to develop a tool
that gives more room to substance in policy making: the different motivations, ambitions and political
views of people in planning processes. Following scholars that take the work of Mouffe one step
further, we look at concepts of boundary work and boundary objects (Metze, 2010), policy
arrangements (Buizer, 2009) and a trading zone approach (Saporito, 2016) to come to a better
understanding of, and a practical solution to, how to work with conflicting views in practice on
planning process as well as substance. Second, we turn to social psychology and conflict resolution
(Illes et al. 2014, Nash et al. 2010) to better understand the conflicts at stake around land-use
decisions and to identify productive and counterproductive strategies to work with these conflicts.
Third, we take inspiration in business literature to better understand how we can depict conflicting
views for land-use and how we can come to a workable and integral concept of how to use a specific
plot of land.