Citizen participation is often a goal of urban development. However, in reality levels of actual participation are often low, limited to certain sets of stakeholders, and the collaboration between them often poor. In engaging with this dilemma, we have established a new research project, Co-constructing city futures (3C), which addresses current challenges to citizen participation in contemporary urban development. The project sets out to encourage and facilitate a shift from processes that intentionally or unintentionally exclude certain groups. Building on ideas about collective learning, it inquires and experiments with public debates and planning processes to enable citizens and other stakeholders to engage in the co-construction of ideas and visions for city futures. Democratic design experiments focusing on green mobility and blue-green infrastructures will be carried out in selected Norwegian cities in collaboration with planners, citizens, and other actors to identify their needs, challenges and interests, and to develop, test and evaluate ideas and prototypes for digital tools that can be applied both in Norway and in other global cities. As a point of departure, we pose three critical questions regarding citizen participation in urban development, with hopes that this can invigorate discussion around this emerging research agenda.
The existing methods used in participatory planning do not enable multifaceted and
truly inclusive public involvement
Current pressures on making planning processes more efficient present a risk of ruling out the involvement of the peripheral voices (i.e. those not required by law or institutional guidelines), especially when time is a scarce resource. The current challenges of low levels of participation and genuine co-construction, and its limitation to a certain set of stakeholders may therefore become more prevalent. Furthermore, planning procedures can generally be defined as step-by-step processes, where the starting point is a planning proposal setting certain agendas that may be difficult to modify. To address these issues and avoid exacerbating the static and linear planning procedures that may exclude citizens and burden future urban environmental sustainability, we view it as imperative to create better means for citizens to express and contribute to their views about urban futures. More importantly, tools that improve the process of genuinely taking these inputs into account must better fit the needs of planning practitioners.
The second problem is the asymmetry in the actors’ resources to participate, and therefore their true opportunity to engage in the plan. Although everyone has an equal right to participate, there is inequality in stakeholders’ abilities to voice their opinion.
The third problem is how the planning law defines who are affected by the plan, and how this is narrowly interpreted in practice. The law requires notifying those “directly” affected, such as landowners and neighbours. However, places in cities are used by a broad spectre of people, even if they do not live or own property there. As a consequence, not all those who are affected in reality will be involved in the participation process to the same degree.
The fourth problem is that although the planning system and the law aspire broad
and thorough participation, most planning processes only use the minimum efforts
required by law, i.e. information and hearing processes. Although there are examples
of thorough participatory activities carried out in Norway, studies have found that in
most plans the bare minimum stages of participation required by the Norwegian ‘Plan
and Building Act’ are used
One ongoing paradigmatic shift that may enable greater citizen engagement in
planning processes is the increasing ubiquity and falling costs of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT). In several arenas, ICTs are being used to
increase the communication and interaction between citizens and governments, and
involve civil society groups in policy and planning processes
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objects, sketching support, geographic information systems, and visualization
software
A key technique for open innovation is crowdsourcing, which agencies may use to
go outside their boundaries to find solutions to problems, issuing a challenge to a
large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new innovative solutions more robust
than those found inside the organization
A key issue the project engages with is improving levels of engagement and democracy in the decisions of how cities are developed. Our proposal is that this can be achieved through enabling citizens to co-construct ideas and visions for city futures. The issue of democracy in planning has long been an important issue, and is expected to become increasingly relevant. This is particularly due to increasing political pressures to make planning processes more efficient, thereby risking the sidelining of citizen voice and input to fast-tracked, non-consultative urban planning processes. We maintain, however, that contrary to excluding citizens from these processes to speed up planning timeframes, early engagement of a wide range of stakeholders may also contribute to higher efficiency. This can be enabled by involving citizen groups and coming to consensus at the planning starting point before practitioners make significant decisions that can only be modified through a complete transformation of the original plan. 2.1
Part of the challenge of the 3C project will be encouraging and facilitating a shift from a step-by-step planning participation, that intentionally or unintentionally excludes certain interest groups, into a more emergent, dynamic and responsive planning system, where shared and open representations are used actively in decisionmaking processes. The project seeks to make representations available and transformed into scenarios of what city futures might be. Due to the interactive and accessible ICT platforms, these scenarios will include inputs from the citizens, and will be Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016 Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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constantly changing during the participatory process and based on the collected input. Scenarios may constitute primary material for citizens to visualize and understand the future consequences of current activities and decisions. The development of future scenarios, which are visualized, enacted, and co-interpreted in the context of real life conditions is a breakthrough concept.
In 3C, scenarios are broadly understood and will be represented by knowledge
objects, which will range in complexity, from simple digital notes, images, texts, videos,
visualisations and simulations (e.g. 3D environmental data), as well as relations
between them. In this way futures can be represented in diverse ways. The knowledge
objects are geo-located, and are therefore attached to places, structures,
infrastructures, events, or phenomena in the city and will be visualised overlaying on the
physical urban landscape. This will provide opportunities for experiences and knowledge
building
Citizens have shown willingness to participate in urban planning events using
smart-phones
The research and development in 3C is inspired by democratic design experiments
Identification of stakeholder groups, governmental bodies, and their matters of concern has been conducted in two large cities in Norway, in order to map the urban planning process, stakeholder involvement, the challenges and opportunities, and the level of citizen participation in the overall processes. In the mapping, a range of issues are addressed, such as governmental policies and practices, reorganization of municipality planning organizations to deal with higher demands for effective and cross departmental collaboration, the rise and organization of activist groups, e.g. their use of social media to enroll and lobby their interests. Of particular interest is the use and translations of material resources as such as plans, maps, videos, sketches, etc.
Based on the initial mapping, a number of design experiments will be carried out, addressing issues towards future sustainable cities. The design experiments will have a central role in the project, bringing together governmental bodies, stakeholder Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016 Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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groups, and research in ways that may foster collaborative learning and knowledge building.
A central idea is to inquire existing socio-material networks and how they may
foster learning within practice
We are currently investigating governmental agencies, service providers, and stakeholders in two major Norwegian cities and have selected two arenas of urban sustainability; 1) green mobility and 2) urban blue-green infrastructure.
The aim for 3C is to contribute to organizational capacity in governmental and stakeholder groups, not only to recombine old ideas and synthesize and conceive new ones, but also to translate them into improved practices of planning and participation. 3C will innovate in many aspects, including how to better communicate plans, and how to improve dialogues between a diverse range of stakeholders. 3
There are key impediments to citizens and other stakeholder articulating their desires
in often top-down, linear, or fragmented urban planning processes. We outline three
of these below.
1. How can the silos of planning and governance be managed?
Government intervention in local policy processes occurs frequently but may rarely
be linked up to broader interests or effectively coordinated across bureaucratic
‘silos’
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thinking is to be able to see challenges of resources holistically, and therefore
achieve cost-efficient solutions.
3. How can the quality of dialogues and collaborative learning be improved?
Despite this uptake, 3C is also aware that social media such as Twitter and
Facebook are somewhat limited both in the scope of activities they offer as well as the
kinds of tools they offer, but are excellent ways to reach out to citizens for deeper
engagement or participation
A critical challenge is to foster environments where social media are used for
‘exploratory talk’ rather than ‘accountable talk’ in which participants prioritise development
of ideas and issues over presentation and defense of their own positions
A city that obviates its citizens’ needs and wishes will have a hard time creating a quality of life. Co-construction and involvement in the decisions that create our surroundings is therefore crucial to making cities that work. The concepts of coconstruction, collective learning and collaborative planning go beyond narrow notions of participation so often found in planning guidelines and regulations, improving the quality of debates and the final proposals for city development.
These themes are especially relevant in Norway, as the government plans to reduce
the time spent in planning processes drastically, as well as using more ICT in order to
reach the goals
There is also an obvious democratic argument to participation in planning. The new ways of interacting and co-constructing city developments will be of benefit to citizens, interest groups and other stakeholders, in that they can create a sense of justice in the process, as well as ownership to what is being executed in their urban environments. The project seeks to improve the stakeholder and societal dialogues about decisions that shape city futures. Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016 Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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6 7
In this brief article we have outlined some of the important issues related to citizen participation in planning processes, and introduced the key aspects of the 3C project that aim to address these issues through the use of ICTs. Further, we present three key challenges that could be addressed by researchers and practitioners engaging with this field. In reflecting on these, we encourage others to consider how to develop research and practice agendas that grapple with them. In general, we see a considerable opportunity for ICTs to reshape how citizens and states engage with respect to urban planning and development processes. Enhancing citizen participation is however not only a question about developing and introducing new technical tools, but also about actually making them work in urban planning processes and systems of urban planning practice. We look forward to contributing to this emerging agenda.
We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the 4th Workshop Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age. 3C is funded under the ICT PLUS and digital innovation programme by the Norwegian Research Council, grant no. 259905.