Strategic planning as the intentional production of a “Trading Zone”

For a long period of time there has been a kind of mirroring between the development of decision making models in Political science and the concepts and paradigms used in Planning theory. The dialogue has been interrupted when the "Garbage Can" model was proposed by Choen, March and Olsen in 1972: a model that emphasized the irreducible complexity of the policy processes. The article reconstructs this relationship and its evolution showing the influence of decision-making models on planning theory, and showing the difficulties of managing complexity for planners. The paper holds that interpreting planning processes through the lens of the "Trading zone" concept proposed by Peter Galison in the field of history of science could be an interesting way of dealing with the extreme complexity of contemporary planning problems. The conclusion is that the use of the Trading Zone concept is very promising to solve some dilemmas of planning theory and that it is particularly useful if we employ it in the growing area of strategic spatial planning

Improving Access to Mental Health Care in an Orthodox Jewish Community: A Critical Reflection Upon the Accommodation of Otherness

The English National Health Service (NHS) has significantly extended the supply of evidence based psychological interventions in primary care for people experiencing common mental health problems. Yet despite the extra resources, the accessibility of services for ‘under-served’ ethnic and religious minority groups, is considerably short of the levels of access that may be necessary to offset the health inequalities created by their different exposure to services, resulting in negative health outcomes. This paper offers a critical reflection upon an initiative that sought to improve access to an NHS funded primary care mental health service to one ‘under-served’ population, an Orthodox Jewish community in the North West of England