Planning Conflicts and Participation: the Gigafactory Tesla

Conflicts are considered as vital elements of plural democracies in agonistic political and planning theory. According to this theory, antagonisms are to be tamed and channeled into agonistic disputes. Therefore, forms of participation in planning procedures play a key role in the resolution and regulation of conflicts. The central question of this paper is the role of participatory procedures in planning in order to resolve and settle conflicts, which occur in a particularly sharp way in the context of large-scale projects. The paper presents planning conflicts and forms of participation using the case of the settlement of the Gigafactory Tesla in the German state of Brandenburg. Within the framework of an empirical case study, the approval procedure of the project and a land use plan procedure of the municipality are analysed. Both procedures are characterized by a great acceleration, early preliminary decisions and participation deficits. The result shows that in the case of the settlement of Tesla, in addition to conflicts of interest, values and location, procedural conflicts also occur, which call the acceptance of planning into question. The forms of participation practiced do not prove suitable for taming conflicts, but rather produce mistrust among opponents and reinforce antagonistic dynamics.