Public consultation meetings: the room where listening is performed

Every council has a consultation night. Residents file in with folded printouts, a microphone is passed around like a relay baton, and three hours later the planners go home with the same plan they brought. The meeting is rarely a failure of goodwill. It is a failure of design. Speaking for two minutes to a dais is a skill, and the people with the time and polish to acquire it are usually the people who already had the most say. The loudest room is not the most representative one. What strikes me is how often the meeting is held at the end of the process, when the decision has hardened, so its real function is ritual: proof that people were asked, not evidence that their answers moved anything. A consultation that cannot visibly change a single line of the plan is a press conference with chairs.