Expectations. Hope and despair: professionals’ struggle to navigate multiple planning ideas in public-private collaboration

This chapter gives insights into the practical dilemmas of collaboration in sustainable city development by recounting the experiences of a group of sustainability process managers, who struggled to work together within a private-public collaborative framework. The dilemmas are described from the perspective of the managers and their need to navigate a multitude of parallel ideas or models for the way planning should be managed and what collaboration should comprise. This situation places excessive pressure on individual professionals to resolve how to proceed, and at the same time leaves them quite ill-prepared for doing so.