Journal of Public Deliberation

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, bepress, which has been given certain exclusive rights by the author. Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, and its surrounding metropolitan area ranks highly among the world’s most liveable cities.1 However, it is experiencing urban sprawl, and given the predicted high rates of growth, continued growth outwards is unsustainable. To harness the creativity of the community, the Minister for Planning and Infrastructure decided to engage the people of Perth in determining their future. The process that was implemented, Dialogue with the City, became the largest deliberative forum in the southern hemisphere and a case study in deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy, or participatory democracy, has been described as a nascent social movement, a response to the perceived inadequacies of representative democracy.2 According to Levine,3 democrac