Writing as an officer for an English local government organisation, this author explores the policy-making challenges of urban planning and housing to accommodate growing populations in a context of argued land shortages, growing expectations and more diverse communities. It presents serious challenges on the feasibility and implementation of ideas of co-productive policy making where there is neither consensus nor respect for pluralism. As the contribution makes painfully clear, the nature of the challenge is partly about whether opening up policy to the public is consistent with social justice and other strategic concerns.

The contribution is based on hard-bitten experience in one city of attempts to have an informed conversation about the use of land and provision of housing across the whole area, and across many different population groups. York is at once a very special case, as a historic city and world tourist destination, but also illustrative of many other cases. There are similar debates in other places, over other scarce or contested resources, and in other policy fields. Paul McCabe documents the city's many, and often fraught, experiences of asking citizens to think about growth, and being rejected. Undaunted, he outlines new efforts to create a sense of shared vision and common purpose between policy makers and hundreds of thousands of citizens.