Let's Talk About Cities #7 – Participatory Planning
What is the definition of participatory planning?
Wikipedia defines participatory planning as “an urban planning paradigm that emphasizes involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural. It is often considered as part of community development. Participatory planning aims to harmonize views among all of its participants as well as prevent conflict between opposing parties. In addition, marginalized groups have an opportunity to participate in the planning process.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_planning, online 19.01.2022)
Why is participatory planning relevant?
Even though urban planners, designers, architects, landscape architects are educated to consider and include different user groups, the lack of representation among them and/or the decision makers may lead to planning solutions that might be unsuited for some. Participatory planning facilitates finding solutions that fit various user groups together and at the same time acceptance for new solutions is often acquired more easily. Often, those groups that work together in the participatory planning process are locals that know the site or situation that is in need of improvement very well. This is a huge asset for planners as it helps to understand the site much quicker. Or if - e.g a blind person - participates, he/she can give concrete input on what they need.
Moreover, if people that are respected within a community participate in a project or planning process, they might act like a representative for those collectively developed solutions. These solutions could thus be better accepted. Furthermore, if people for example took part in the revitalisation of a street and actively helped by setting up planters, they most possibly are taking better care of them in the future too and act as custodians.
The shift from top-down to bottom-up planning
The emergence of participatory planning is in a sense linked to the space between modernity and postmodernity.
In very general terms, modernity was or is characterised by the supreme rule of Reason with a capital R which in architecture and urban planning translated to modernistic planning ideals such as “Form follows Function” and seeing buildings and cities as machines that must be rationally, optimally assembled. Such an approach necessitates experts who have acquired the knowledge or power required to produce optimal designs. That is an image that has been represented in popular culture, in books like The Fountainhead: the lone genius white male architect (Howard Roarke) who shapes our surroundings as they should be. Even the antithesis to Roarke is the figure who at university learns what there is to learn and in practice then reproduces it. Neither alternative approaches nor the labourers who do the productive work are represented as they are not authorities.
Postmodernity, then, represents a critical reflection on the rule of Reason and the power structures inherent in it. One here has to distinguish between what is and what could be. Whether it is a hallmark of later modernity or already postmodernity, the rule of Reason has generally prevailed but perhaps logically moved from the generalist expert towards specialisation, meaning knowledge and thus power becomes more decentralised and distanced. The same tendency exists within bureaucracy, as institutions splinter and lay a yet stronger claim to the specialised knowledge and authority.
The early theory on participatory planning brought about the idea of decentralised knowledge and therefore power but in a democratising sense rather than in a distancing, authoritative way.
Jane Jacobs, in the 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, heavily criticised modernist planners such as Le Corbusier and Robert Moses for their overreliance on rationality and how modernistic planning oversimplifies and disregards the complexity of human lives in urban communities. As she was a woman and not an educated planner, the reaction of many professionals was one of anger and on that basis she was discredited but since then her work has become influential within planning theory, education and community activism.
Christopher Alexander, in his 1965 essay A City is not a Tree, also criticised the oversimplified understanding of the structure of a city as a tree – in which each subdivision of a branch is connected with a larger branch and ultimately the trunk, but there aren’t connections between branches. Alexander argued that in real cities different systems overlap, more like a lattice, and such complexity is difficult to comprehend or understand. Given the complexity of cities and their communities as described by Jacobs and Alexander, theories followed that suggested the necessity of input from a wide range of people to plan cities and moving away from rationalist, top-down planning.
Henri Lefebvre approached the planning of cities and wider yet the production of space as a matter of power and control. Space, according to Lefebvre, is a social construction which itself shapes social practice and perception. Within capitalism, Lefebvre argues, spaces produced are based on exchange value over use value – commodification – and thus reproduce capitalist social relations of production, perpetuating hierarchical power structures and the hegemonic domination of thoughts and actions of citizens. To change society, the production of space has to change and vice-versa. Lefebvre’s by now famous concept of the right to the city, from the eponymous 1968 book, is therefore not just the freedom of citizens to live and act within the spaces of a city but their democratic right to change it, to participate in the production of space based on use value over exchange value. He also criticised rationality as an end rather than a means as it meant the search for coherence in an incoherent world. The city is filled with conflicting needs which under the ideology of coherence are denied through the stressed importance of consensus. The city should, however, be a “synthesis of everyday life”, of those conflicting needs. That notion of agonism rather than consensus as well as the right of each citizen to shape their city raises a fundamental question of the role of the architect or planner: to which degree should they retain authority, to which degree should the public be directly involved in decision making and in what mode?
Sherry Arnstein, in her 1969 essay A Ladder of Citizen Participation, presented a model for identifying 8 different degrees or levels of participation ranging from empty rituals to meaningful involvement and ultimately citizen control. It is a knowingly simplistic and abstract representation of power relations, intended to help in the analysis of their real, complex counterparts. The description of each level, or rungs of the ladder as presented by Arnstein, would be a bit too long for this episode but we strongly suggest you read the essay – which contains examples from each rung – and we’ll come back to them as we discuss different examples of participatory planning in practice.
Since the sixties different theories and methodologies for participation have been formed. We won’t address each one but summarise their evolution as follows: the tension between agonism/consensus and reflection on power/rationality within planning has been established and together with the question of wicked problems or information overload has been the pertinent point and challenge going forward.
What are obstacles of participatory planning?
From a decision-makers point of view, a participatory planning process might take a lot longer than one that is more “top-down”. Some simply don’t have the needed skills to incorporate participation in their decision-making process. (Istenič, S. & Kozina, J. 2020) However, planning solutions of a successful participatory process are often more long-lasting and are better accepted by the citizens.
Other obstacles might be that some people either don’t have the time to join participatory planning processes or simply aren’t interested. This often leads to only a certain group of people taking part in such collaborative planning processes. Another obstacle of participatory planning is the often lacking transparency within the processes. If it isn’t clearly communicated in what way the citizen’s input will be considered it can be frustrating and lead to them not wanting to further involve themselves. Furthermore, it should be clear what the role of the participant in the planning process is. In some participatory processes citizens are mainly involved to deliver information, sometimes they mainly “serve” for an already made decision to be justified in retrospect. (Chouinard JA, Milley P.: 2018)
Is there an alternative to participatory planning?
There are other ways to not only involve citizens into a planning process but actually give them power. An example for this could be “participatory budgeting”. The model of “participatory budgeting” actively involves citizens by letting them decide on what a certain amount of money is spent. It aims at making sure that the main priorities of citizens are fulfilled. (Malena, C. et al.: n.d)
Examples of participatory planning processes
In most democratic countries there are elements of public participation embedded in the process of creating plans such as zoning plans. Typically the proposal has to be publicly displayed and opinions on it must be recorded. But the views, positive or negative, don’t necessarily have to lead to changes in the plan. Such consultations are on the fourth of Arnstein’s eight rungs, together with informing and placating under the category of tokenistic levels of participation. As they offer no assurances that the views of the public will be taken into account, they can be a convenient way for authorities to appear democratic when really they use that appearance to justify decisions that were already made. They are also examples of deliberative democracy, fundamentally geared towards consensus and firmly within rationalistic logic.
Superkilen, a public square in Copenhagen, Denmark, was designed by BIG, Topotek1 and Superflex. It’s located in the multicultural district Nørrebro, next to a neighbourhood designated by the Danish government as a ghetto. In a break from municipal consultation, Superflex asked people living in the area which objects they would like to see placed in the square instead of typical street and park furniture. The over 100 objects from more than 50 countries are either from a respondent’s country of origin or from somewhere they have travelled and include a donut sign from the US, a dentist’s sign from Qatar, a basketball hoop from Somalia and a fountain from Morocco. Superflex also employed a process which they call “extreme participation”, travelling with 5 groups to 5 countries to retrieve an object from each, for example soil from Palestine.
But the story behind the rhetoric of Superkilen is that there were already citizens’ initiatives for the development of the area which were ignored by the municipality. The project was funded by a private organisation and the participating citizens were selected. The district Nørrebro is experiencing gentrification in no small part in the wake of Superkilen being built. There is no empowering moment in the process of Superkilen but rather a privatisation of not just public space but the production of space under the guise of participation. It is comparable to the Las Vegas Strip in its appropriation of cultural images and its greatest success is its representation on social media and in architectural journals as a shining example of participative design, fulfilling its role as spectacle. Superkilen is a particularly cynical example of the recuperation of a concept meant to increase citizens’ involvement in the production of space, a mirage of facilitating that concept which is sold back to the public and praised for it.
Common for any process is the importance of who is involved and for whom it is being undertaken.