The temporal deliberation approach: How to work with time in deliberative processes

Abstract

How do planners engage with the diverse temporalities that shape deliberative processes? Crucially, how might they address the hidden conflicts that this diversity can lead to? This paper advances what we term ‘the Temporal Deliberation Approach’, a flexible lens through which deliberative practitioners can identify new avenues for working with the multiple temporalities that participants bring to deliberative processes. Developed from observations from two planning cases, the Approach is informed by critical temporal scholarship, alongside emerging temporal scholarship from within the planning literature. We introduce a set of key processes and three capacities – temporal multi-layeredness, temporal empathy and temporal flexibility – which we argue can enhance pluralistic integrative deliberations.

Keywords

planning time studies temporal deliberation deliberation temporality participatory planning

Introduction

When people meet in participatory settings, many forms of temporality meet as well. Diverse perspectives of time are present in all forms of interaction, such as assumptions around the right time to do something, how fast a process should go, or which past is deemed relevant for the present. This diversity can lead to hidden conflicts, with consequences for collaboration (Bastian, 2014a; Ryan, 2008). Critical time scholars, in particular, have broadened the scope of how we might understand temporal conflicts, drawing attention to issues such as the role of time in social coordination, the range of social values implicit within it, and the way concepts of time are implicit in how we seek to enact change (Adam, 1998; Bastian, 2014b). As these scholars point out, the ability to address social justice concerns is entangled with the ability to transform seemingly invisible temporal power structures and related social infrastructures of time (Huebener, 2015; Mahadeo, 2024; Sharma, 2014). Even so, it has been widely recognised that there are scarce methodological resources available to scholars and practitioners from any field for recognising and engaging with temporal conflicts (Facer et al., 2022; Jensen and Laws, 2025).

In the field of planning in particular, the backgrounding of time is widely evident. While planning is replete with temporal terms (Connell, 2009; Laurian and Inch, 2019) and critical spatial approaches are widespread, the larger question of how to work with the multiple temporalities that shape particular contexts have rarely been asked (Jensen and Laws, 2025). As a result, there are new calls to engage critically with the multiple temporalities of planning to address, not just how to create shared visions for the future, but the more hidden problems of temporal power and inequality (Dobson and Parker, 2024; Durrant et al., 2023). Nevertheless, the question remains open of how to integrate an awareness of the multiple temporalities of society into the specific techniques and methods planners use to collaborate, negotiate and otherwise ‘muddle through’ the complex and uneven problems that accompany any deliberative process or effort to transition environments (Jensen, Galland and Harrison, 2025; Laurian and Inch, 2019: 268). Deliberative planners thus have an important role in addressing the gap represented by time for planning more generally, by seeking to address the question of how to engage with the diverse temporalities that shape deliberative planning processes.

In this article we offer an analysis of two experimental community-engagement processes, which each author had previously designed and led. These processes were part of separate collaborative projects that combined research with practice, and which we subsequently identified as having considerable overlap in their aims and design. By combining our insights from these processes, we seek to advance new avenues for actively working with multiple temporalities within deliberative processes by proposing what we term the Temporal Deliberation Approach. By ‘approach' we do not mean a fixed methodology, but rather an overall framework or strategy for considering temporal conflicts in complex contexts that sensitises practitioners and planners to their context-specific manifestations and to ways of addressing them with participants. As Laurian and Inch have pointed out, the temporal dimensions of planning are hard to perceive without explicit efforts to create “particular ways of seeing” (2019: 267). We have thus taken inspiration from Metzger and Tamm-Hallström’s avocation of holding open experimental spaces for planning participants to examine and perhaps even reconceive of “ingrained habits of thought and action” (2022: 519) and situate our approach within this type of experimental deliberations.

Indeed, our approach builds on recent multidisciplinary efforts, discussed below, to find new ways to surface what has long been ingrained and backgrounded, including via the development of temporal literacy (Huebener, 2015) and temporal design (Pschetz and Bastian, 2018). We aim, above all, to contribute to theoretical debates around deliberative planning by connecting them with critical time scholarship, while also providing concepts and empirical examples that can help deliberative planners to identify their own contextually responsive techniques for supporting participants to identify and unpack relevant temporal complexities and conflicts that arise in their efforts to create change. Importantly, we suggest that the work of temporal deliberation does not only provide ways of recognising the multi-layeredness of time but also has the potential to foster key capacities that integrative deliberative theory has highlighted, including enhanced perspective-taking and the expansion of self-interests (Setälä, 2025), through the development of what we have termed ‘temporal empathy’ and ‘temporal flexibility’.

In what follows, we build on Laurian and Inch’s (2019) comprehensive overview of time in planning to highlight how temporality has been treated in deliberative planning more specifically. First, we situate the Temporal Deliberation Approach within recent deliberative debates concerned with experimentation, the deliberative facilitator and deliberative spaces. However, we note the lack of attention towards the multiple temporalities constituting deliberative processes, while also highlighting implicit engagements that might aid in new theorising. We then advance the Temporal Deliberation Approach, describing the theoretical perspectives that inform it and key processes which we suggest might constitute it. Subsequently, we present the two empirical cases that informed our proposed approach and draw from observations of our own practice to deepen our theoretical considerations. From here, we offer a discussion of some of the possible benefits the approach might have for deliberative planning based on an analysis of the empirical materials from both of our projects. We conclude by arguing that a focus on the implicit ways that time shapes the worldviews of participants in deliberative processes has the potential to enhance key aims of integrative deliberation, and to offer new avenues for facilitators to engage with conflicts. Even so, we also identify the need for further research to develop the approach and to more fully understand its benefits and limitations.

The deliberative roots of the temporal deliberation approach

We situate the Temporal Deliberation Approach within recent deliberative theory that has moved away from the previously dominant focus on consensus, reasoned debate and the ideals of democratic deliberation drawing from Habermas. Instead, and in line with our interest in making visible the complexities of time, we place ourselves within deliberative theory that emphasizes pluralism, responsiveness to changing contexts, critical listening and reflection, and open-ended dialogues (Mansbridge et al., 2006). Described by Setälä (2025) as ‘integrative’ or ‘inclusive’ deliberative approaches, these shifts away from Habermasian deliberation aim to integrate diverse, and often conflicting, perspectives through mutual learning processes or efforts to include ‘all-affected interests’, including those not present either spatially or temporally (such as future generations). This results in deliberative spaces that seek either to foster enhanced perspective-taking and expanded self-interest and/or to address issues of marginalisation and justice (Setälä, 2025). As we will suggest in the concluding reflections, our approach has the potential to expand the possibilities of both integrative and inclusive deliberation beyond pre-existing concerns with future generations to begin to consider the temporality of marginalisation in a greater variety of ways.

First though, it is important to recognise the ways that temporality already appears in deliberative planning literature, even if largely implicitly. Here we add new elements to the comprehensive scaffolding provided by Laurian and Inch (2019). The first of these is the framing of deliberations as ‘transitional processes.’ No matter the type of democratic deliberation, the common denominator across them is an attention to deliberative processes as transformational thresholds in which communities are assisted in moving on from current understandings of conflicts, debates and interests by challenging, reframing and/or questioning entrenched understandings (Inch, 2015; Mansbridge et al., 2006). Indeed, the ability to mediate between past and future is often highlighted as a central feature of deliberations, particularly via drawing on community histories and coordinating across past-future visions to address present grievances (e.g., Fischer, 2006). Sandercock (2000), for example, writes about deliberations as therapeutic in the sense that they enable a transition from emotionally charged pasts to new, imaginative futures. Similarly, Forester focuses on how deliberative reframing can lead to a movement from ‘past failures to future possibilities’ (2006: 451).

Importantly, unlike conventional understandings of time that assume an unceasing flow from the past into the present and future, deliberative processes recognise the need for transformational thresholds to be proactively designed and facilitated (Inch, 2015; Metzger and Tamm-Hallström, 2022). Ryfe (2005) for example, relates deliberations to “a disturbance in everyday reasoning habits” (p. 56) where the present serves as an opportunity to redirect the flow of time into different kinds of futures. While Forester et al.’s (2019) “reconstruction clinic”, offers us an important case of intervention in a policy conflict in the city of Amsterdam, where a deliberative process design was developed through attention to the past. The clinic sought to create the conditions for people to participate in deliberations by getting them “unstuck” from their conflicting perspectives through critical reflections on shared histories. This attention to the past was credited with, among others, enabling “an understanding and feeling [of] interdependence and being able to act upon it” (italics in original, Forester et al., 2019: 470).

What we take from these examples is that the deliberative process, as a transitional process, is already seen as intervening into senses of pasts and/or futures as a core element of supporting community and place-based change. Even so, we argue that there remains an opportunity to create approaches that encompass broader aspects of time, such as its role in social and institutional coordination. Indeed, as we will see in our discussion of our cases below, our own explicit attention to how time is framed (such as through generational stories or technical models) in the case of Jensen, or to how western ideals of progress impinge on our understanding of the causal relationship between past, present and future in the case of Bastian, give two examples of how to expand the ways we might deliberate by directing critical attention to participants’ implicit notions of appropriate or inappropriate uses of time in everyday life.

A second element we identify in the deliberative literature is concerned with temporal expertise, which foregrounds the temporal skills and methods required of deliberative facilitators. While there is an explicit recognition of this form of expertise by Laurian and Inch (2019: 278), it has elsewhere remained implicit. With Forester's (1999) notion of the deliberative practitioner, for example, there is an emphasis on expertise derived over time from real-life planning cases, which focuses on the ability to improvise and “the capacity to seize the moment” (Laurian and Inch, 2019: 278). Scholars further point towards the temporal design of deliberative processes through, for example, the right stages or phases of deliberations, as well as questions around how time can be managed through a focus on pace and timing (e.g. Christiansen, 2015; Marshall, 2016). The ability to identify crucial decision-making moments is also suggested as a key temporal skill for facilitators, which emphasises the fleeting nature of opportune moments (e.g., Mansbridge et al., 2006; Laws, 2020).

This literature suggests that the ability to work closely with the temporality of the deliberative process is already an important skill. Where we would like to push deliberative theory further is in how this can be supplemented with introducing time into the content of deliberations. We note that the expertise of the deliberative facilitator has rarely, if ever, included approaches for unpacking how assumptions about time might be hindering or supporting core activities like mutual learning processes, the recognition of marginalised interests, the possibility of perspective-taking and/or expanded self-interest. Our interest is thus in bringing such inquiries to the fore and showing how the cultivation of critical temporal expertise in deliberative planning settings is a necessary part of addressing power and conflict through attention to their largely implicit temporal forms. This involves supplementing work like that which we have highlighted here, with themes arising in critical temporal scholarship that attend to a wider variety of ways that time is bound up in social formations.

The temporal roots of the temporal deliberation approach

Critical time studies is a nascent, cross-disciplinary field, building on time studies (e.g. Adam 1998), which seeks not only to identify the multiple temporalities that actors with varying interests coordinate with, make and adjust towards in their everyday lives, but to actively develop ways of working across temporal plurality to address its political and conflictual nature (e.g.; Huebener, 2015; Mahadeo, 2024; Sharma, 2014). One avenue has been to increase analytical capacity around our thinking about time, including by challenging implicit logics and introducing a wider range of concepts that work beyond past-present-future framings. Adam’s transformative Time and Social Theory (1990), in particular, criticised the frequently dualistic ways that scholars treat time in the social sciences, calling for a richer perspective, which looks for the interconnections across multiple aspects of time in social life. Building on this, Huebener has defined critical time studies as “a process of inquiry that advances thoughtful re-evaluations of the social politics of time through the examination of temporal assumptions and the fostering of critical temporal literacy” (2015: 14). Developing the skills to ‘see’ the hidden social dimensions of time and discuss them critically, as Laurian and Inch call for, is here tied to a wider conceptual vocabulary that includes prompts to investigate problems such as ‘temporal discrimination’; the possibilities of ‘temporal resistance’; the ways variable ‘temporal framing’ shapes our understandings of events; and the often implicit ‘time socialization stories’ that provide us with cultural guides for how to work with and live in time (Huebener, 2015: 14-22). Indeed, as we will see below, both temporal framing and socialised stories of progress became key aspects of the deliberative dialogues we each conducted. Even so, given the stubborn tendency for time to remain backgrounded in scholarly research, some 35 years since Adam’s intervention, we also reiterate the call from within critical time studies to actively cultivate new concepts and languages for addressing issues of power and inequality central to deliberative practice.

Secondly, critical temporal expertise also rests on understanding temporality as an aspect of our everyday lives that can be intervened in and changed. Here we draw inspiration from designer Larissa Pschetz’s Temporal Design approach (Pschetz, 2015), and its development with Bastian (Pschetz et al., 2016). Related to our concerns about the lack of scholarly attention to time in deliberative planning (and planning more generally), Pschetz calls on the field of design to take a broader view of time, questioning the dominance of future thinking, accelerationism, and even those interventions thought to counteract problematic tendencies such as Slow Design (Pschetz, 2015). In contrast, Pschetz et al. (2016), build on work that treats our experiences of time as socially shaped both across cultures and history. They thus invite designers to move beyond time as a flow between past-present-future, which may be sped up, slowed down, or different pasts emphasised, and instead focus on “social infrastructures of time” with a deeper focus on time’s coordinating, structuring and evaluative aspects (Pschetz et al., 2022). Crucially for our practitioner focus, Pschetz and Bastian argue for an interventionist approach that calls for the development of tools to disclose hidden aspects of temporality, to challenge dominant understandings, or to reveal alternative temporal perspectives and networks (Pschetz et al., 2016).

We contend that deliberative practitioners, like designers, can also have a key role in developing ways of facilitating across the diverse temporalities in participatory processes. Indeed, they are uniquely placed to develop vocabularies and tools that surface implicit temporalities that move from awareness to the explicit work of deliberating between the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, times found in any effort to foster transformational change. In proposing the Temporal Deliberation Approach, we thus seek to promote the recognition that the lived worlds of participants in planning processes include conceptions of how time works, how change occurs through time, as well as future projections and prejudgements arising from participants’ past experiences. Any planning process is not just dealing with people’s present perceptions and their hopes for the future, but with all the ways they have previously figured out how to make sense of the multiple temporalities they encounter in their lived worlds. Crucially, we invite deliberative practitioners to proactively construct experimental, and even challenging, deliberative processes in which temporal differences are surfaced, discussed and potentially collectively transformed. We thus highlight a new role for the deliberative practitioner as one who assists groups in moving towards an awareness of time’s role in organisation, co-ordination and legitimation (Pschetz et al., 2016), as well as fostering critical reflections on the power dimensions of and interdependent nature of time (Sharma, 2014). We next introduce frames for how this might start to be implemented.

The temporal deliberation approach: Processes and cases

Our proposal of the Temporal Deliberation Approach arises from observations of two real-life planning cases, where each of the authors independently developed new practices to address temporal elements of participatory processes. After recognising overlaps in our approaches, we subsequently undertook a collaborative analysis of our practice, where we identified a common set of key processes, which we here propose as a framework from which to develop specific forms of Temporal Deliberation. These two cases were, firstly, Interventions in a deliberative process for a river which is based on interventions in an intermunicipal planning process for the largest river in Denmark, Gudenåen, between 2020-2022. Here our analysis draws from recordings, physical material and fieldnotes from three workshops with twenty-six participants. Our second case, Excavating the future of local food in a port city, is based on an intervention in 2012-2013 in Liverpool, UK where new approaches to the planning of city greenspaces were being developed. Here our analysis draws on reflections on fifteen local history workshops; surveys and focus group interviews with volunteers, recorded and transcribed; observational notes from public events and a range of designed objects and processes shared with the public. We first state our overarching key processes, before drawing out how they appeared in each case.¹

Mobilising the Temporal Deliberation Approach, we propose, arises from implementing a context-sensitive set of processes, where temporal diversity can be surfaced and addressed. Deliberative practitioners interested in building this into their work might thus:

1) Build up knowledge of the context, whether this be through interviews, site visits, scoping exercises or similar, with the aim of identifying temporal differences, which can then act as a playful starting point for deliberations.

2) Recognise that people are rarely able to talk about the complexities of time without suitable prompts (Birth, 2004; Pschetz et al., 2022), and thus identify (or even invent) a broad ‘method of approach’ that resonates with their contexts, while also opening up deeper conversations about time. These approaches could foreground non-clock ways of keeping time that arise locally, or other resonant activities, and can be co-created with participants.

3) Plan contextually relevant activities, which can adapt and respond to the deliberative processes, in ways that facilitate between temporal differences. In our cases this included developing materials to compare seasonal rounds or to compare greenspace use over time.

4) Grasp the emerging outcomes and results of engaging with temporal differences. Outcomes and results from the processes can be co-created, with participants deciding what kinds of messages they want to share, and what kinds of communicative vehicles could best achieve this.

Note that we focus here on processes instead of the more common use of deliberative ‘phases’ or ‘stages’, as we want to highlight the iterative and non-linear nature of the Temporal Deliberation Approach. We do not conceive of the approach in terms of a linear progression between phases such as preparation, learning, deliberation and implementation (cf. Forester, 2009). Instead, multiple phases might take place throughout these processes. We also see outcomes as emerging throughout rather than being predefined, as discussed by Ben-Tovim (Bastian, 2014b). To see how these processes were enacted in our own activities, we will now turn to our two case studies. These cases offer situational perspectives on what the Temporal Deliberation Approach looks like in different settings and concrete answers to how these processes have unfolded in practice.

Case one: Interventions in a deliberative process for a river

Background

In 2019 and 2020, severe flooding occurred within the Danish river landscape of Gudenåen. This threatened local livelihoods and led to the initiation of an intermunicipal planning process for the river landscape. The aim for the seven municipalities, responsible for the planning process, was to create a plan for the management of present and future water levels, which was predicted to increase due, in large part, to climate change (Helhedsplan for Gudenåen, 2021). The plan included the most ambitious attempt to deliberate between diverse stakeholder perspectives in Denmark so far, at both a local, regional and national level, which took place through interviews, meetings and workshops in which a total of 107 actors participated.

Identifying a node of temporal conflict

Through her pre-existing involvement in the planning process, including conducting participant observation, the design of workshops and interviews, Jensen identified that temporal differences were a key (but hidden) source of conflict and miscommunication. For example, Jensen found that participants’ narratives of the changing river landscape revealed distinct ways of implicitly organising past, present and future. In other words, multiple time frames appeared, which highlighted how different pasts were deemed valid for the present, such as the present being interpreted by a farmer through generational stories, an archaeologist through historical layers and excavations, and an environmental advocate through nature’s shifting rhythms and human interventions in the river’s flow (Jensen and Laws, 2025). At the same time, Jensen also found that participants were embedded within, and adjusting to, different temporal rhythms and social infrastructures of time in their everyday lives, such as a farmer coordinating with subsidy scheme deadlines, family rhythms and shifting water fluctuations (Jensen, 2026; Pschetz et al., 2022). Such temporal frameworks were becoming increasingly misaligned, leading to temporal mismatches and feelings such as grief, anxiety and stress, which also fed into the planning process, as people wanted stable frameworks for decisions that they could rely on in the future (Jensen, 2026).

Method of approach

Responding to these findings, Jensen designed a series of experimental workshops to explore a form of temporally-sensitive deliberation, based explicitly on integrative democratic deliberative theory and methods. The workshops took place in 2022 with a focus on the most flood prone stretch of the river, where conflicts were correspondingly centred. Twenty-six participants were divided into three groups, each group with a diverse set of participants represented, such as farmers, archaeologists, nature conservationists and public officials. The workshops were divided into three themes: (1) the past, (2) the present and (3) the future. One aim was to challenge these notions of the past, present and the future as temporal blocks succeeding each other in linear flows of time and instead give room to heterogenous experiences of time. Another aim was to arrive at ‘the future’ for the river landscape that put participants’ different experiences of time to the fore to enable new forms of dialogues.

Planning contextually relevant activities

Jensen designed and applied drawings and exercises to aid in igniting temporal reflections, such as timelines, seasonal rounds and drawings of the future, which were based on insights into key conflicts arising from participant observation and interviews from the official stakeholder involvement process. Importantly, to spark reflection on personal and shared temporalities, all exercises were first done individually, then shared with other group members, and finally completed together. Activities in the first workshop focused on uncovering diverse timelines; the second highlighted mismatched temporal rhythms in participants’ everyday lives; and the final workshop explored imagining the future through these multiple temporalities. Notably, as new reflections emerged, participants began to propose their own ideas for activities, in addition to those that were designed beforehand.

Grasping and sharing outcomes

Each workshop featured a plenary discussion at the end, where groups shared their reflections and outcomes, and hereafter discussed these with the other groups. Between each workshop, participants were also invited to reflect on if and how they wanted outcomes to be shared and through what possible formats. Further, Jensen observed and recorded group conversations to grasp relevant temporal themes that arose. These observations were shared at the last workshop, where participants were invited to reflect on and discuss them. It was further agreed at the last workshop that Jensen would write a report on the findings, which would be shared with the broader public. Participants here also decided to continue to explore outcomes through dialogue meetings and disseminate the results within their own social networks.

Case two: Excavating the future of local food in a port city

Background

After the 2008 financial crash and the shift of political power in the UK to the centre-right Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, a new ‘era of austerity’ was introduced (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012). Deep cuts in local government budgets were coupled with a ‘Big Society’ agenda that aimed “to devolve powers to communities and establish a greater role in public services for voluntary and community organisations” (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012: 30). The local food movement offered cash-strapped local councils a way of outsourcing some of the management of green spaces, leading to new policy and planning approaches that opened up green and brown field sites to volunteers (e.g., Lever et al., 2019). The ‘Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden’ project ran in 2012-2013 with support from the Liverpool council and community engagement team of the Merseyside NHS, in part to provide planners with insights into how broader temporal imaginaries of local food might encourage more local participation in food projects and build groups who could take over and manage specific green spaces.

Identifying a node of temporal conflict

While local food activism was seen as relatively new in the city, local history projects have long been popular, often focused on Liverpool’s trading and port histories, as well as its musical and cultural legacies. Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden leveraged this historical interest to uncover new urban histories of local food production and feed this into imaginations of the city’s present and future possibilities. Unlike contemporary community projects such as Incredible Edible Todmorden (Thompson, 2012), which drew on its market town pasts to inspire present action, drawing on Liverpool’s past is inherently more conflictual given its international maritime past and its deep involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The starting point for the project was, thus, what came to be called a ‘temporal portal’. This ‘portal’ was a plaque commemorating ‘Mr Seel’s Garden’, erected as part of a huge redevelopment of the city’s shopping centre called Liverpool One. The plaque reproduces an 18^th Century map, indicating that on a site now occupied by a chain supermarket, there was once a market garden. This garden, so emblematic of the kinds of local food systems that have been lost, was, however, owned by the slave trader Mr Thomas Seel. The portal’s juxtaposition of modern and historic food systems drew together multiple elements – food, maps, history, time, power, cruelty, memory and the intertwining of the local and the global. This complexity suggested a way of engaging with the past, while avoiding much of the problematic flattening and romanticisation of historical food growing activities such as the Victory Garden movement, which had been criticised by researchers and local food activists (Bramall, 2011).

Method of approach

Our tailored methods drew out the complexities of our ‘temporal portal’ to create a multi-layered history where local food did not follow a progressive model of increase or decline but flowed according to a variety of incentives and pressures. Based on the questions and interests of the community groups involved, we initially devised a series of workshops for volunteers to learn new historical research methods using oral histories, historical maps and archival research to build a complex picture of where food came from in the city. In all, our volunteers produced 27 hour-long oral history interviews, identified over 600 historical local food locations and created a database of hundreds of selections from our archive research. These findings were collected with the aim of utilising them in a second phase of the project that focused on provoking more complex senses of time in the wider community.

Planning contextually relevant activities

Throughout the project we adapted to meet our core volunteers’ interests while also collectively looking for dissemination opportunities to bring our insights into wider conversations in Liverpool. Indeed five of the 15 workshops we held where added post-hoc to allow participants to explore issues in more depth. Key here to the question of bringing out temporal conflicts was putting our different types of data into conversation with each other, via collaborative analysis of the data themselves, but also in the ways the volunteers spoke for the perspectives arising from their own activity strands during group sessions.

Grasping and sharing outcomes

Our approach to giving expression and form to the temporal conflicts identified in the project was guided by our teams’ designers led by Chris Speed. After running a Collaborative Analysis Day with our core volunteers, we identified themes we collectively wanted to highlight, as well as brainstorming activities through which we might share them. This data was then drawn on to hold several public events, to build an interactive map, an iPhone app, a verbatim theatre performance, local food related postcards and Mr Seel’s themed food packaging, among other activities. Our data were also shared with illustrators, digital artists, and poets who created further works, and we collectively attended open days and festivals to expand our collection of memories and local food sites.

Investigating the capacities afforded by the temporal deliberation approach

While our analysis of our individual processes suggested the initial framework for undertaking temporal deliberations outlined above, our analysis of the empirical materials arising from our projects suggests key capacities afforded by the approach, which also merit further investigation. First, the aim in both of our contexts was to raise awareness of, and capacities for talking about, the multiple temporalities of deliberative spaces. We found indications that in developing this awareness, there is the further potential to build greater capacities in areas which we have described as ‘temporal empathy’ and ‘temporal flexibility’. These capacities, we argue, were what enabled explicitly temporal deliberations. In our cases this entailed:

(1) the cultivation of a sense of temporal multi-layeredness, i.e., the explicit recognition that time was not a single line, but rather that multiple understandings of time co-existed (cf. Huebener, 2015: 22). This led to,

(2) forms of temporal empathy, where participants suggested it became easier for them to empathise with other temporal perspectives, and to identify the inequalities in how people’s senses of time are addressed that arose (cf Reychler 2015: 27; Pschetz and Bastian 2018). This in turn supported the final aspect,

(3) temporal flexibility, where participants were able to shift their initial temporal perspectives and see how a variety of options might be reasonably pursued in the future (cf. Facer, 2023).

These proposed capacities are highly resonant, we argue, with ones that deliberative practitioners seek to develop in their practice and offer frames for how planning theory can expand to consider ways of supporting participants to think with and explore the myriad ways in which time can be deliberated upon. We will now turn to an analysis of each one of these capacities in turn, before reflecting on how these empirical illustrations might contribute further to deliberative theory and actual settings of deliberations.

Cultivating temporal multi-layeredness

In the case of the river Gudenåen, participants articulated a sense of temporal multi-layeredness in several ways. In the first workshop, this was related to people’s different time frames, where participants were asked to first draw individual timelines, share them with each other and then construct a new shared timeline. When sharing her timeline with her other group members, one participant noted that:

It’s a little exciting because I’ve taken a starting point in my own childhood story. But then when we come to talk about when different things happen, I think, God! This is actually where I wrote that ‘here the river begins to disappear’ and then I can see that that has a direct significance on something that has happened, which I may not have known before I came. (Workshop 1)

The participant’s reflection reveals a moment of recognising that multiple pasts coexist, which ignited discussions and different interpretations in the group of why and how changes in the river occurred. In the plenary discussion, in relation to the same exercise, she further reflected that: “I think that is what makes it interesting to talk about these different time perspectives (…) to also represent one’s own history by the water” (Workshop 1), noting how her own temporal perspective was not the only one. To this remark, another participant stated that:

There are such different time perspectives (…) but everything is interesting in relation to the fact that history intervenes into each other, so things are connected in one way or another and intervene when we are in the present. (Workshop 1)

There was thus a sense of a heterogeneous past that intervened in and shaped the present, where multiple pasts were flowing into the present from different angles. A similar sense of multi-layeredness was found within the Mr Seel’s Garden project. In discussing the project, participants articulated a sense of temporality where the past was not necessarily over and done with but was still a force today. As one described it, when asked how they visualised the past:

I suppose I do see things all kind of layered on top of each other, but also happening at the same time, so still being present with us. (Focus Group 1)

Participants further discussed how the project changed their lived sense of their surroundings to create historical overlayerings that pervade what they ‘see’ when they go about their everyday activities. One participant in the historical map workshops described the after-effects of researching the area around where they lived:

I now have a picture in my head of, you know, what was on the other side of Rose Lane when those houses weren’t there, so when I walk down Rose Lane I can see fields instead and I--, I’ve taken that from it. I can add into my vision of where I live these other sort of little bits of history and time. (Focus Group 2)

This sense of a present constitutively layered with a variety of pasts constructed a sense of time where any romantic return to the past (a criticism often levelled at local food projects) made little sense. Instead, the idea of ‘getting back to’ some particular past was described as impossible since:

if we’ve taken history as we’ve kind of made a consensus today, it’s not even possible to do that, because it’s not even a linear thing that you can slide along and slide back, it’s like, you know, it’s all mulched now. You’re here, where you are. (Focus Group 2)

With time becoming less of a line, and more of a compost heap, participants challenged prominent time socialisation stories of both progressive and regressive notions of social change and sought to instead operate from the complexities of a non-homogenous present.

In both cases then, we appear to have met our aim of raising awareness of multiple temporalities and opportunities for talking about them. In the field of critical time studies, however, there has been a call to do more than re-tread the recognition that time is multi-layered, something well-established in time studies for decades, and move to showing how this multiplicity matters (e.g. Jordheim, 2014). As we will discuss next, our analysis suggests that deliberative contexts are uniquely placed to contribute to this task by showing how efforts to build more complex senses of time within these processes have the potential to affect how communities approach conflicts by fostering temporal forms of empathy and flexibility.

Fostering temporal empathy

For the Mr Seel’s Garden participants, the growing complexity of their sense of place over time encouraged a form of slowing down that was seen as important for developing a more ethical basis for decisions around land use change. For example, in the context of significant inequality seen in Liverpool, one participant remarked:

And working with other people with different conceptions and perspectives … I think that really is important, because otherwise…you end up with just recording or, detailing, probably things that are just standard or banal, possibly. Or easy or quick or something and I think you need time and space to do it in a different way, which is particularly, in areas where the history’s been largely eroded, lost, destroyed, forgotten, whatever. In areas, particularly in areas of deprivation, where they’ve had so much rebuilding and all that, so a lot of the local history’s gone. You need to rethink it in different ways. (Focus Group 1)

Here we see a form of temporal empathy that conflict scholar Luc Reychler (2015: 27) has described as “the capacity and will to discern how others think and feel about time”. Importantly, we see this temporal empathy translated into the specific context of planning. Across the different workshop types, the understanding of dramatic landscape change that became apparent through the historical map workshops was deepened by interviews with locals for the oral history strand which linked 20^th century slum clearances and urbanisation with people’s own accounts of being moved out and displaced. Crucially it was an empathy based, in part, on understanding which communities were able to retain a temporal connection with place, and those underserved communities, who could not.

In the case of Gudenåen, temporal empathy was particularly prompted by an increased awareness of the ways that senses of time were inevitably shaped by the experience of flooding. For example, for many public officials, temporal empathy was particularly felt towards those ‘affected’, or perspectives seen as ‘localised’:

It is the ones who are personally affected, they have a much shorter time horizon. I think we experienced that those who had a personal relationship with the river have a slightly shorter time horizon, and it makes sense that it is those who have felt affected by floods. (Workshop 1)

Participants within the groups who had a ‘longer’ time horizon stretching into the past could thus empathise with shorter time horizons found with people living with rapid socio-ecological changes within the river landscape. The temporal empathy cultivated in earlier workshops also had consequences for following discussions in other workshops, where lived perspectives often ended up dominating group discussions, as reiterated by an archaeologist, when sharing and discussing their seasonal rounds in Workshop 2:

Well, there are three of us, who have not personally experienced our annual cycle in correlation with the river Gudenåen (…) so [the landowner in our group] lives here and has had water in the backyard, so it has been very much his experiences in connection to his drawing of the year, how it was affected. (Workshop 2)

Interestingly in both the final workshop and within feedback e-mails, participants showed a greater awareness of, and empathy towards, others' temporal perspectives. One participant, for example, noted that:

Things must work together. We need biodiversity, dissemination of cultural history because it is rooted in us, so it is important that we pass it on to the next (RED: generation), so I think there are so many things in this – but also that it is maintained. As the Gudenå is now, there is a lot that is man-made, but there is also some nature that needs to be helped along the way, depending on what kind of nature you want to have back, then there will have to be some maintenance (…) but it is also important that you take our history, those of us who live by the river, our history into this project. (Workshop 3)

Here, the participant, a local landowner, highlighted, and empathized with, other temporal perspectives within his group, including the archaeologist’s focus on cultural history and the environmental advocate’s concern for supporting nature, alongside his own personal history with the river. Importantly, this illustrates how temporal empathy can foster temporal flexibility, as the landowner shifted from focusing solely on his own generational time frame, observed by Jensen in initial workshops, to recognizing that “things must work together”. Temporal empathy, we found, often functioned as a catalyst for temporal flexibility – a theme we explore next.

Enabling temporal flexibility

So, what consequences did multi-temporality and temporal empathy have for participants’ flexibility in their initial temporal perspectives and for opening for other possibilities to how their local landscapes could look like in the future? With the participants in the Mr Seel’s Garden project, the suggestion of an increased flexibility appeared both in general feelings of wanting to be more careful about recommending changes, as well as more specific revisions around assumptions brought into the project:

I think if you’re more considered and you have, obviously, more understanding of how things have been developed, their place, their purpose and so on, you’re much more, hopefully, going to be more considered about any changes you recommend, or any changes you accept or any developments. Which doesn’t mean to say you’re gonna be resistant to it. (Focus group 2)

A temporal flexibility could also be seen in comments on the motivation for understanding histories of place when planning future projects:

That would be my motivation I think, is that you understand the history in order to make good judgements about the future and what to do. So, you end up with a more nuanced picture, as far as possible, you know, a broad, you know, understanding. And you need history as part of that—. (Focus group 3)

For the local food project, participants also became more flexible around what the past could offer to the present. The past was not simply a site of inspiration or something to abandon, but a shifting resource which could offer warnings, as well as new points of view. For example, in contrast to the bucolic countryside one might imagine from having looked at the older maps:

One of the things, maybe you get more in the oral history, one of the things that doesn’t come over is about how, um, unhealthy and repulsive and horrible the past could be. Like, everyone’s going on, you know, cowkeeping in Liverpool. Well, you know the conditions that those cows were kept in, as they were in New York, infamously, they were kept indoors most of the time and fed some horrid semi-liquid stuff. (Focus group 1)

While recognising how they would be more flexible in the ways they took up the temporal imperatives within current local food movements, which often uncritically valorise the past, participants suggested that the kinds of multi-layered historical narratives they had developed could induce others to be more flexible as well. Here history could be seen as helping to lobby for change, by showcasing concrete alternatives from the past that could legitimise planning proposals that might seem too radical in the present. Even so, participants described how they remained aware of the dangers in using the past to legitimise calls for change in the present, since the past could be used both as an inspiration for change and validation for rejecting it. Overall, the suggestion was that what was most beneficial was specifically the flexibility that a more complex understanding of the past offered to decisions taken now, without being constrained by naïve ideas of historical progress.

In the case of the river Gudenåen, more complex understandings of the past also opened up new discussions on possible futures. In the first workshop’s plenary discussion, which centred on the diversity of drawn timelines, one participant noted that: “Many of the historical perspectives from the museum people set new thoughts in motion!” (Workshop 1). A participant from a different group also observed that:

It was good to talk about Gudenåen in a historical perspective, and I think that was very interesting. It made me think that all the water levels and conditions that have existed in and along the Gudenåen have all had an underlying cause. You have had to live with that every day, and we have to do that now with the changed climate. It is not so unique what we are in – historically speaking. (Workshop 1).

The sharing and discussions of time frames led to new ways of thinking, which enabled new ways of deeming other pasts relevant for the present, and reweaving temporal perspectives. In this manner, participants were ruptured from their “routine scripts” (Ryfe, 2005: 56), which lead to enhanced perspective-taking and an expansion of temporal perspectives through “reconciling it with the interests of their fellow deliberators” (Setälä, 2025: 6). This did not only count for human others, but also for more-than-human others, as in this case with a public official, who in a conversation on the seasonal round with Jensen noted that:

The river’s rhythms are connected to my own work rhythms. When there is a lot of water, and the water level is high, there is a lot of calendar activity, and when not, there is little activity (…). (Interview 2)

This led to a discussion on how “one’s own rhythms might be better fitted to that of the river’s” and thus also fostered enhanced perspective-taking to that of the river’s rhythms and options for rethinking coordination. Interestingly, participants also became aware of how temporal differences could hinder deliberative efforts if people were locked in their own positions. This was evident in the final plenary discussion in Workshop 3, when temporal frames were discussed:

I also think that it’s part of the disagreement that exists, it is that people’s own frame of reference, and what they themselves like, makes the difference, what is so important in such a process, is that one avoids digging ditches and throw mud at each other. (Workshop 3)

In this way, participants recognized that addressing temporal differences could create the conditions for people to shift in their initial temporal perspectives, which could help solve disagreements, and enable participation in deliberative efforts (Forester et al., 2019).

Concluding reflections

As identified at the outset of our paper, deliberative planning theory has sought ways to enhance integrative deliberations that emphasise ongoing reflection, enhanced perspective-taking and expanded self-interests without the ultimate goal of consensus. At the same time, we highlighted the ways that, implicit within the deliberative planning literature, there is an attention to planning processes as transformational in nature. This includes designing and facilitating transformational thresholds that engage proactively with local pasts and future, and second, an implicit interest in temporal expertise within deliberative practice, currently seen most readily in questions of pacing, timing and sequencing. Our proposal is that by engaging substantively with critical time studies, deliberative planning theory could broaden out conceptualisations of both transformational thresholds and temporal expertise and enhance possibilities for pluralistic integrative deliberations.

For example, the official stakeholder involvement process co-designed by municipalities and Jensen for the river Gudenå – and in which 107 actors participated – stemmed precisely from the observation that the aims of integrative deliberation, i.e., enhanced perspective-taking, the expansion of self-interests and mutually acceptable solutions, were not met due to stakeholders implicitly reasoning from different temporal frames. By using perspectives and techniques from critical time studies and temporal design, Jensen sought to create a transformational threshold in deliberations that built complex understandings of the current differences and raised awareness of how seemingly incompatible framings of past, present and future were implicitly hindering deliberative efforts. Importantly, this process – which we have here theorised more generally as Temporal Deliberation – occurred within pre-existing deliberative efforts, and methods, which shows how temporally sensitive facilitation can be deployed as and when practitioners become cognisant of crucial temporal conflicts.

Further, we have shown that cultivating a greater awareness of the temporal multi-layeredness of their specific context has the potential to help participants build empathy towards others’ experiences of time, while also increasing the flexibility with which they understand their own. Making temporalities visible and available for reflective discussions can thus be used to unsettle participants’ everyday reasoning habits or routine scripts (Ryfe, 2005) and add to our understanding of what kinds of conditions are needed for community members to partake in deliberative settings (Forester et al., 2019). In the case of Mr Seel’s Garden, for example, participants reported that their new awareness of the implicit ideas progress and regress they had overlaid on notions of the past and future, led to a new capacity to draw reflexively on historical elements within planning debates around land use. Discussions about planning proposals for greenspace use thus become more nuanced, not only through increased historical knowledge, but through more critical insight into the ways that concepts of temporal progression and regression have become drawn into local food debates.

Even so, our approach is not without potential barriers. First, our approach draws on case studies that were undertaken in research-led contexts. This means that they were conducted by facilitators, who were also scholars in time studies, and so had a theoretical underpinning to their work, which helped them mobilise complex concepts of time in their particular deliberative settings. We acknowledge that critical temporal vocabularies have only recently been introduced in planning theory, where critical spatial approaches are more established. As Jensen together with co-authors have argued elsewhere (Jensen, Galland and Harrison, 2025), a critical temporal focus thus undoubtedly presents a new educational undertaking for planners.

A second key barrier is one that has been identified in the deliberative planning literature itself and, ironically, relates to the temporal barriers that planners and/or participants must negotiate, chiefly through issues of pace, time scarcity or the time-consuming aspect of deliberative processes (Laurian, 2007; Wolf and Van Dooren, 2018). This includes what has been identified as temporal inequality (Laurian, 2007, 2009). For example, Raco et al. (2018) show how time as a resource is linked to power and control, and how some temporal needs and resources are often suppressed in favour of others. In our cases, participation in our processes required more than a one-off engagement, but instead the ability to attend multiple workshops or events, as well as the interest in continuing to develop discussions after the central project activities were completed.

Nevertheless, we hope that our proposal of a Temporal Deliberation approach opens new avenues for both deliberative planning theory and practice, by showcasing the benefits of engaging more deliberately with critical time studies and experimenting more with the content of deliberations. While planners have become more attuned to the ways that income, race, gender, sexuality and other social categories play a role in social conflict, the ways that perceptions and structures of time also take part in these processes are largely just starting to be explored. A Temporal Deliberation Approach is, thus, a necessary addition to our deliberative toolkits, offering a way into one of the great under-addressed challenges for community justice and equality. From here, it is our hope that the approach can offer a framework that inspires new experimental practices, developed by facilitators with the communities they work with in their own context-sensitive ways.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to WSP Denmark for funding the three workshops in the Interventions in a deliberative process for the River Gudenåen case study as a part of the on-going development of new approaches and methods for participatory processes. A huge thank you to all the participants in the workshops for their thoughtful engagements and reflections. The Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden project was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/J006629/1). Thank you to the AHRC for supporting the innovative Connected Communities programme and to the whole Mr Seel’s Garden research team for their contributions to the project. Both authors also benefited from discussions convened as part of the British Academy funded Time(s) of a Just Transition project.

ORCID iDs

Miriam Holst Jensen

Michelle Bastian

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the Arts and Humanities Research Council; AH/J006629/1; Innovation Fund Denmark, WSP Denmark and the Skanderborg Water Utility.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

Author biographies

Miriam Holst Jensen is a postdoc at the Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research focus on time, conflicts and what she terms as ‘the cultivation of temporal attunement’ in deliberative planning processes.

Michelle Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and from 2022-2024 an Associate Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. Her work looks at the role of time in human and non-human environments. Currently, she is exploring seasonal timing in plants and animals and how this is changing in a time of climate breakdown.

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