How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public’s perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants “confer” and “retract” in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public’s expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

Much recent research has pointed out the generally declining influence of planning on urban development, often explaining this trend with major structural shifts in the world economy. In this paper we take a somewhat different tack founded upon a "devil is in the detail" intuition. Tracing the City of Stockholm's urban governance landscape over the course of a century, we examine how overarching patterns of change are reflected in and reproduced through the organisation of local planning and development administrations. Our point is not to dispute the relevance of broader structural explanations, but rather to suggest that any ambition to change the currently dominant development-led regime must combine more general understandings of broad international trends with a detailed understanding of the concrete institutional mechanisms that come to produce specific patterns of effects at a particular time and place. The paper argues that for urban planning to be promoted as a governance of place, more research on identifying the critical institutional mechanisms which enable or constrain the realisation of particular policy goals is needed.

In recent years public-centered understandings of democracy have become important inspirations for scholarly debates concerning the democratization of planning processes. In this article we caution that an exclusively public-centered understanding of planning democracy risks obscuring how public engagements in planning processes always unfold within the context of longer trajectories and broader landscapes of the evolution of democracy. In the article we counterpoint a particularly sophisticated public-centered conceptualization of democracy developed by philosopher Noortje Marres to the more historical-institutional understanding of Pierre Rosanvallon. By applying both analytical frameworks to an empirical case, we show that although Marres' public-centered approach can productively advance understandings of key dynamics in how public action in planning processes unfolds, its narrow focus on the 'heat of the action' in such episodes produces analytical blind spots with regards to the wider prerequisites and ramifications of these events. Therefore we conclude by suggesting that public-centered analyses of democracy in planning processes are at their most helpful when complemented with a more institutional understanding of the contexts within which public engagements in planning unfold.