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This special issue focuses on scaling up the participation of residents and their associations in planning processes. The need to consider this aspect of participation has long been recognized; indeed, the capacity to go to scale is increasingly seen as essential to successful development initiatives. What is equally well recognized is the failure of multiple efforts to respond adequately to this need for scaling. The papers in this collection explore many facets of the challenge of securing meaningful participation at scale. They clarify the fact that going beyond a local focus means not simply replication but engagement at higher levels of complexity, with a more challenging set of actors and potentially more contested power relations. As Beatrice De Carli and Alexandre Apsan Frediani emphasize in this volume, this means engaging with “the more conflictual, structural factors that underpin city making”(page 377). Together …