“A delivery vehicle for change and democracy”: Exploring care and scale in digital engagement

Abstract

The Special Issue defines ‘housing disruptors’ as the emerging ideologies, practices, and logics capable of changing the housing system. In this paper, I argue digital engagement technologies were a housing disruptor for combining an ethic of care and technological scale in order to reimagine planning democracy and ultimately the delivery of equitable housing. First, I outline the care ethics of digital engagement and connect it to a lineage of planning theory that values deliberative participation and agonistic urban politics. I then interrogate the meaning of scale in digital engagement and how it contributes to urban democracy and justice issues. However, the structural limitations that practitioners faced in practice put into question how possible it was to apply a scale logic from the technological and business world, which sought to streamline and grow, to a planning system (that is complex) and solutions to the housing crisis (even more complex). My concluding remarks suggest that digital engagement was symbolic for the changing value principles in planning, as one that was committed to a fairer and more equitable planning system; but how successful it was (or has been) able to provide an alternative planning structure remains uncertain.