Tacit planning: transferring practitioner know-how into contemporary practice

Building on the call for local government planners to reformulate state-market relations and the research of Michael Polanyi into personal knowledge, this paper explores the necessity for planners to re-insert themselves into real estate development by using their most valuable asset, the transference of their own tacit knowledge. During their careers, planners accumulate an abundance of tacit knowledge in relation to their local domains. This know-how includes public and private contacts, ownership, neighbour problems, infrastructure issues and more generally, an historical perspective of local development. Just by knowing the local community and 'how things work', provides planners with a useful avenue for mediating any conflicts or disruptions to development. However, echoing the observation by Adams and Tiesdell that planners don't always know their own affectivity, Polyani argued that people, in this case planners, are occasionally not aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be of value to others. The paper concludes that the transmission of this un-spoken knowledge will only be possible if it is revealed in a network or community of real estate practice.