Speaker
Description
Several European countries are progressively redefining the terms of the social pact with their citizens and reconfiguring governance arrangements according to the idea of a smaller welfare state and more self-responsible citizens, some of whom themselves claim a more active role. These two-way pushes can be mutually reinforcing and have led to new opportunities and spaces for collaborative governance as well as possible exploitation. Although the idea of the active citizen is not new, we are facing a further elaboration, where citizens are ostensibly in charge of implementing spatial transformation plans, taking care of spaces, social infrastructure and services in the city through devolutionary policy, common goods regulations and as last resort. In other words, they are actively co-producing and co-managing the city. This paper, therefore, discusses the emergence of what we define as ‘super-citizens’ in governance and spatial planning as an effect of institutional frameworks that increasingly emphasise active participation and responsibility in communities to shape and take care of their locality. In this context, the idea of a hierarchical relationship between citizens and governments is being supplanted by several parallel spaces in which power is discussed and negotiated (Newman, 2005; Williams et al., 2014).
The rise of the ‘super-citizen’ as an expert citizen endowed with local knowledge and the ability to bridge political authority and civil society. The paper discusses the implications of restructuring the welfare state on public-private responsibilities (Bragaglia, 2021) and - drawing on theories of collaborative urban governance in the field of urban studies and empirical cases in the English, French and Italian contexts - highlights the dual nature of these transformations. On the one hand, they enable citizens to co-create policies and solutions in collaboration with state actors. On the other, they often impose new demands for self-management and adaptability, aligning with overarching pressures for efficiency and responsiveness. The ‘super-citizen’ embodies this duality, acting both as an agent of community development and as a potential negotiator of institutional frameworks. While the rise of the super-citizen represents an important opportunity to continue experimenting with shared solutions of collaborative governance, it also raises several questions and implications. This concerns, for example, the ethics of voluntarism in planning (Parker et al., 2020), the representativeness of these subjects of the visions of the city of which they are bearers, as well as the fact that their acquired professionalism and their collaborative approach with institutions. These factors distinguish them from the antagonism that characterised the political identity of social movements (Castells, 1997) and, thus, the risk that potential dissent is made less and less visible through this new figure of the super-citizen. If the super-citizen is increasingly seen as a necessary or effective partner for institutions in the day-to-day management of and in the development of cities, it is necessary to critically interrogate these new forms of collaboration.
References
Bragaglia, Francesca (2021) Social innovation as a ‘magic concept’ for policy-makers and its implications for urban governance. Planning Theory, 20 (2), pp. 102-120.
Castells, Manuel (1997) An introduction to the information age. City, 2 (7), pp. 6-16.
Newman, Janet (ed.) (2005) Remaking governance: Peoples, politics and the public sphere. Bristol: Policy Press.
Parker, Gavin; Dobson, Mark; Lynn, Tessa; and Salter, Kat (2020) Entangling voluntarism, leisure time and political work: the governmentalities of neighbourhood planning in England. Leisure Studies, 39 (5), pp. 644-658.
Williams, Andrew; Goodwin, Mark; and Cloke, Paul (2014) Neoliberalism, big society, and progressive localism. Environment and Planning A, 46 (12), pp. 2798-2815.
| Keywords | super-citizens; collaborative governance, urban policies, social innovation |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
