Toward the Relational City: Imaginaries, Expertise, Experiments - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 191

record and listen to the swarming of different imperceptible propositions
that demand to be taken into account.” 15
Processes of negotiation and democratic deliberation are familiar in
urban theory and practice, particularly in the fi eld of communicative plan-
ning, in which discursive forms of urban development are emphasized. 16
Planning theorist John Forester summarizes this approach:
In cities and regions, neighborhoods and towns, planners typically have to shuttle
back and forth between public agency staff and privately interested parties, be-
tween neighborhood and corporate representatives, between elected offi cials and
civil service bureaucrats. They do not just shuttle back and forth though. Trying
to listen carefully and argue persuasively, they do much more. They work to
encourage practical public deliberation—public listening, learning and beginning
to act on innovative agreements too—as they move project and policy proposals
forward to viable implementation or decisive rejection. 17
Forester's program of urban politics is one of negotiation and mediation
between different social actors in which the expert serves as a broker
of information between different stakeholders and actively engages in
forging compromise. Communicative planners focus on the humans in
planning processes, an approach similar to a relational understanding of
social ordering and agency. 18 However, Forester and other communicative
planners adhere to a decidedly anthropocentric forms of communicative
rationality, an approach most closely associated with Jürgen Habermas's
theory of communicative rationality. 19 Dryzek notes that for Habermas,
the only voices that matter are human. 20 The relational insistence on a
“more-than-human” world has signifi cant implications for communica-
tive rationality because it requires us to involve not only humans but also
nonhumans in political deliberation. 21
Dryzek makes an explicit link between deliberative democracy and
communication with nonhumans by forwarding the notion of ecologi-
cal democracy. He notes that like communicative rationality, democratic
theory has also been limited to an anthropocentric focus. Rather than
adopting an ecocentric perspective, as many environmentalists have done,
Dryzek argues for the extension of Habermas's communicative rationality
to nonhuman actors:
The key here is to downplay “centrism” of any kind, and focus instead on the
kinds of interactions that might occur across the boundaries between humanity and
nature. In this spirit, the search for green democracy can indeed involve looking
for less anthropocentric political forms. For democracy can exist not only among
humans, but also in human dealings with the natural world—though not in that
natural world, or in any simple model which nature provides for humanity. So the