In Part Two, we explore the everyday practices of neighbourhood planning and the experiences of participants, and through these emerging histories, we investigate the key themes of power and empowerment, democratic renewal, and the remaking of planning and place. In the first three chapters, the emphasis is on the lived realities of neighbourhood planning, and the challenges, compromises and frustrations encountered in navigating the conflicting rationales of localism. These chapters introduce the range of actors engaged at the neighbourhood level and present divergent views and interpretations of the democratic practices of the locality, and the empowering potential of citizen planning. In the final two chapters in this section, we review these experiences to evaluate the extent to which power relations are changed through the constrained freedoms of localism, and how neighbourhood planning might impact on the purposes and democratic practices of planning.

In Chapter Six, David McGuinness and Carol Ludwig review the experiences of two of the earliest neighbourhood planning groups and chart the production of their neighbourhood plans, with a particular focus on the barriers to democratic practice in planning. Chapter Seven is innovative in introducing a range of voices from neighbourhood planning participants, each recounting their experiences in their own words. These accounts from neighbourhood planners, local authority planning officers, developers and consultants illuminate changing roles, a reshaping of planning knowledge and the frustrations of constructing an inclusive, local and democratic planning practice. These themes are investigated in a different context in Chapter Eight, as Claire Colomb challenges the possibilities of neighbourhood planning in the ethnic and socio-economic tensions of urban centres. Reviewing the practices of neighbourhood planning in London boroughs, she identifies the exclusionary dynamics evident in the construction of coherent localities and evidences the power claims made in the name of engaged communities. These questions of power and empowerment are explored further in Chapter Nine, as Sue Brownill reviews the impact of neighbourhood planning on the regulation of development and the expected outcomes of growth-dependent planning. Her chapter evidences changes in the topology of power relations as a result of neighbourhood planning and provides a clear analysis of their impact.