Speaker
Description
This paper explores arising tensions and contradictions in participatory planning against the backdrop of strategic spatial planning and other overlapping nested planning paradigms (Albrechts, 2013). This is significant as the field of planning has shifted from traditional land-use planning to area-based, actor-driven and process-oriented planning (Albrechts, 2013). The aforementioned tensions are explored through the term “meaningfulness”, a sensitizing concept that is frequently used in planning practice and literature to capture an unmet desire felt by actors in participatory processes. It builds on the argument that these processes can be meaningful (Yeoman, 2019) when they offer opportunities for worthwhile activities that allow citizens to contribute to their living environment through care, stewardship, maintenance and repair. However, the absence of meaningfulness can lead to citizens feeling alienated from their living environment, other actors and the processes that sustain its development. This, understandably, impacts the perceived legitimacy of urban governance, subsequently influencing sustainable transitions in cities.
The research builds on this concept of meaningfulness based on action research conducted by the author in a deliberative participatory process for the proposed transformation of a former industrial district in a major Dutch city. The research included municipal data from an instrumental participatory process, municipal policy documents and ethnographic data. The author, as a researcher and contributing member of the process, followed the interactions between a citizen delegation, a municipal project team, and a facilitator, all with the collective goal of exploring the ambitions of a municipal structural framework plan for the district. The citizen delegation aimed to present a collective value map, developed alongside other stakeholders, to encapsulate the 'soul' of the existing lived environment, which they felt was inadequately represented in the municipal framework plan.
The study of these interactions offers grounded insights into how actors experience meaningfulness, or the lack thereof, while participating in collaborative processes urban transition projects. To operationalise “meaningful” outcomes, the intentions of actors or commitments to action (Bratman, 1987), are used to study their motivation to seek or invite collaboration over their living environment, and how their actions evolve through collaboration with others. These intentions are studied through the concept of “pragmatic registers” (Stapper and Duyvendak, 2020) which have been adapted in this research from their original conceptualisation in the literature as a tool for sociological critique to a novel methodological tool for transformative social innovation (Avelino et al., 2019) in participatory processes. The research maps three pragmatic registers to illustrate how intentions transform in participatory processes to draw new lessons for meaningful collaboration in participatory planning for urban transitions. The lessons are, a) embracing uncertainty in urban transition projects – scenarios as opposed to normative “frameworks”, b) creating novel institutional arrangements that give local stakeholders opportunities to impact socio-spatial context like facilitating community-benefit agreements, and c) using multi-value creation as a guiding objective as opposed to participative or deliberative democracy.
References
Albrechts, L. (2013) ‘Reframing strategic spatial planning by using a coproduction perspective’, Planning Theory, 12(1), pp. 46–63. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095212452722.
Avelino, F. et al. (2019) ‘Transformative social innovation and (dis)empowerment’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 145, pp. 195–206. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.05.002.
Bratman, M. (1987) Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stapper, E.W. and Duyvendak, J.W. (2020) ‘Good residents, bad residents: How participatory processes in urban redevelopment privilege entrepreneurial citizens’, Cities, 107, p. 102898. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102898.
Yeoman, R. (2019) ‘The Meaningful City: Toward a Theory of Public Meaningfulness, City Institutions, and Civic Work’, in Yeoman, R., The Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work. Edited by R. Yeoman et al. Oxford University Press, pp. 465–486. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198788232.013.28.
| Keywords | meaningful collaboration; participatory planning; pragmatic registers; social innovation; sustainable transition |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
