INTRODUCTIONInvolving multiple stakeholders in spatial and community planning has become a salient concept with decades of legislative support in the United Kingdom (Jenkins, 2002). Many public services now lay claim to having been longstanding supporters of this participatory turn (Bishop, 2015); of which, planning is one. The 1969 Skeffington Report is often evidenced as one of the earliest national level documents to consider public involvement strategies (Baker et al., 2007;Damer et al., 1971). Since then, a plethora of techniques have come to the fore (Sanoff, 2000), and the Scottish Government in recent years endorsed the 'charrette' as an effective participatory design tool to generate strategies for community development (Scottish Government, 2010a, 2011b. The term 'charrette' derives from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in which architecture students would hurriedly work until the 'little cart' came to collect their drawings for the examiners. The term has since been used to connote a sense of urgency, which frames the format of a typical charrette as it is approached today (Walters, 2007). The tool is a participatory 'model' yet malleable enough in the sense that its process constitutes a series of other participatory mechanisms, which can be matched to suit different scenarios (Sanoff, 2000).The model that was introduced to Scotland in 2010 was developed by New Urbanism's cofounder, Andres Duany as part of Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) & Company. The charrette is often their go-to approach to community participation (Grant, 2006), which typically lasts between four to seven days and involves a multidisciplinary team establishing a temporary design studio within the study area. The team will work collaboratively with community members and key stakeholders in a series of interactive workshops, often producing a masterplan that has been developed through a series of short feedback loops (Sanoff, 2000;Walters, 2007). The compressed format has been lauded over other communicative approaches that may last weeks or months. Proponents argue these feedback loops condense the time between input and design to just hours, so not only do participants exercise more influence they can watch a transparent process unfold, thus fostering greater trust (Lennertz, 2003;Walters, 2007). Benefits of this approach therefore do not centre only on the physical; there is a commitment to social goals embedded in New Urbanism (Talen, 2002), and communicative processes more generally.Jurgen Habermas, who many communicative theorists are indebted to, also advocated collaborative discursive approaches to challenge the shortcomings observed in representative democracy (Bond, 2011). These approaches challenged modernist thinking that valued expert epistemologies, and instead believed knowledge to be something coconstructed; not a collation of ideas but rather that communication has the power to build shared meanings through reasoning and deliberative exchange (Brand et al., 2007;Innes et al., 1999). Equally, the charrette's consensus-seeking na...