How do planners engage with the diverse temporalities that shape deliberative processes? Crucially, how might they address the hidden conflicts that this diversity can lead to? This paper advances what we term ‘the Temporal Deliberation Approach’, a flexible lens through which deliberative practitioners can identify new avenues for working with the multiple temporalities that participants bring to deliberative processes. Developed from observations from two planning cases, the Approach is informed by critical temporal scholarship, alongside emerging temporal scholarship from within the planning literature. We introduce a set of key processes and three capacities – temporal multi-layeredness, temporal empathy and temporal flexibility – which we argue can enhance pluralistic integrative deliberations.
Jensen et al. (2026) studied this question.