Going beyond quick fixes and compromises: what design enables when people tailor places to their needs in collaboration

After an era where technical rationality, capital and centralized power dominated the transformation of the cities and regions we live in, a new, process-centric ideal emerged in spatial planning: collaborative planning. It assumes that when all who have a stake in a certain problem get together, egalitarian and free deliberation among them will lead to good decisions. We are critical to this paradigm. It takes more than talking and deliberating to create never- thought-of-solutions and beloved places. Many of our societal and spatial problems (e.g. energy transition, climate change adaptation, structural demographic changes) are not evident at first sight, and cannot be solved by quick solutions and negotiated compromises. They need technical, social and institutional innovations. Moreover, a landscape, whether urban or rural, has a logic of its own, and many interdependencies on various levels of scale. Making good places needs both an integral and long term view and careful detailing and implementation. We observed that in planning processes where designers collaborate with specialists and stakeholders, all multiple dimensions are openly explored and tailormade innovations and solutions emerge. We present Dutch cases of watermanagement and infrastructure design where smart structuration of process and coalition management delivered radically new and rich views on a place, resulting in high-quality places.