Captured by bureaucracy: street-level professionals mediating past, present and future knowledge

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of ‘street-level professionals’ in planning, a peculiar expertise that emerges in response to the decreasing legitimacy and efficacy of public action in urban governance processes. In particular, it looks at the street-level professional in order to question the uneven tension between bureaucratic and tacit knowledge in contemporary participatory processes. The chapter shows how initiatives that attempt to mediate between governmental and local community ambitions are today trapped in existing bureaucratic structures. It argues that planners are in a unique position to develop an expertise for such street-level mediation. However, existing institutions tend to ‘capture’ that mediation through norms that require organising, reducing, and abstracting the complex knowledge of the community. Thus, the chapter contends that this entrapping capacity of institutions is a distinctive logic of today's technocratic planning.