This paper aims to advance the development of participation in urban design from a substantive standpoint. It departs from a prevailing focus on ideals of participation and describing participatory methods and processes. Instead, the paper stresses the need to acknowledge 'the political' nature of public spaces and how this challenges participatory urban design processes. This leads to a substantive exploration of differences, conflicts and power in the planning and design of public spaces, i.e., unearthing the political. The case of a participatory process in a neighbourhood of Barcelona illustrates the theoretical discussion. This helps bring forward a much-needed critical and reflective, rather than idealistic, theorization and practice of participation in urban design.
The involvement of local communities in public space planning and design processes is widely promoted as an essential element of landscape architecture and urban design practice. Despite this, there has been little theorisation of this topic within these fields. Furthermore, the implementation of ideals and principles commonly found in theory are far from becoming mainstream practice, indicating a significant gap between the theory and practice of participation. This thesis aims to contribute to the development of theories of participation in the planning and design of public spaces. It steps away from the prevailing normative and procedural approach to theory development, and instead adopts a critical approach grounded on the deep understanding of the challenges of participation in the planning and design of public spaces. Case studies of two urban renewal projects, in Medellin, Colombia, and in Barcelona, Spain, and their participatory processes, are used for building up the theoretical contribution. The empirical and theoretical findings foreground the contextual and political nature of participatory processes. Contextual, in the sense that the implementation of ideals and principles found in theory is facilitated or hindered by the social, political and economic context in which a participatory process takes place. Political, in the sense that in complex contexts that comprise a wide range of actors, and where contrasting goals and agendas are at stake, the implementation of these theoretical ideals and principles is significantly challenged by politics involving deep differences, conflicts and power relations. The findings also show that prevailing theories of participation within landscape architecture and urban design do not take into consideration the contextual and political nature of participatory processes. This renders these theories weak in their capacity to respond to the challenges encountered by participatory processes in contemporary public space projects. This is particularly so as the dynamics of increasing pluralisation, muliticultarisation and neoliberalisation of cities create contexts that hinder the implementation of the ideals and principles found in theory, and increase the challenges caused by their political nature. Consequently, this thesis proposes a new theoretical approach to participation in the planning and design of public spaces, that allows context-based distinctions and judgements about the qualities of participatory practices for just decision-making. Difference, conflict and power are central in this approach. This thesis establishes this theoretical departure point and makes a significant contribution towards the development of the proposed theoretical approach.
This document compiles a highly discussed issue present in many cities of the developing world today; it brings forward the importance of facing the challenges that slums create to today's cities and the mechanisms used for tackling such challenge. The study focuses on the use of Participatory Planning approaches in the context of slum upgrading, giving the reader an insight to the advantages and challenges that such an approach has. It is built around a case study in the city of Medellin, Colombia where there has been a strong political will and commitment to implement programs and projects in the poorest areas of the city. This initiative emerged as a need to tackle deep rooted problems present in the slum areas of the city that together with other issues placed Medellin as the most dangerous city of the world during the 1990s. For tackling such a problem, the local Administration (2003-2007) created a slum upgrading model called "PUI - Proyecto Urbano Integral" (Integral Urban Project) which is said to be based on "participatory planning" and "slum upgrading" principles. The results of the first project following the "PUI Model", the "PUI Noriental", have been promoted by the Administration as highly successful and been considered as a model for slum upgrading both nationally and internationally. Therefore, there is the need to acknowledge and critically asses the PUI Model by evaluating its principles, its methods and its results having a deeper understanding and assessment of the concepts behind such an approach; specially since it has been internationally recognized that there is a lack of cases in which the ideals of participation and slum upgrading are put in practice. In this order of ideas, the principles, methods and tools of the "PUI Model" and its implementation in the "PUI Noriental", are evaluated based on international theories and experiences dealing with the topic. By doing so, it is shown the close link between the principles of participation and the very nature of slum upgrading processes. As ...
In this paper, we engage with the topic of public participation in landscape planning. Academic discussions and policy rhetoric tend to build on a conceptualisation of landscape as a democratic entity, yet practices of participatory landscape planning often fall short of these ideals. Most scholars approach this rhetoric-practice gap from procedural and normative positions, defining what makes a successful participatory process. We take an alternative approach, scrutinising the role of landscape planning theory in participatory shortcomings, and reveal how poor substantive theorisation of 'the political' nature of landscapes contributes to the difficulties in realising participatory ideals. We engage theoretically with the political dimension, conceptualising and explaining the implications that differences, conflicts and power relations have for participation in landscape planning, that is, politicising the landscape. This theoretical engagement helps bring about a much-needed realignment of substantive theory, procedural theory and practice for developing participation in landscape planning.
Within urban design there is increasing interest in the close relationshipbetween social, economic and political processes and the production of public spaces. Thisrelationship, however, often remains abstract and is rarely illustrated in empirical studies.This paper introduces an institutionalist understanding to the production of public spaces,whereby emphasis is placed on the analysis of structuring forces and actors as a way toapprehend the complexity of the social processes guiding and influencing the planning,design and management of public spaces. The institutionalist understanding is illustratedin the case study of an urban renewal project in Barcelona. The results of the case studyshow the contrasts and tensions between the structuring forces and the different actorsoperating in the project, how structuring forces favoured the interest and claims of someactors over those of others, and the potential risks and challenges that this has for the useand value of the public spaces produced by the project.
This paper focuses on the practices of an emerging group of practitioners in Swedish urban governance: dialogue experts. As dialogical ideals have been mainstreamed in planning policies, civil servants and governance consultants have been increasingly commissioned to engage in dialogue with citizens within public deliberation, planning consultations or citizens budgeting. Even though these practitioners influence the whys, whats and hows of urban development, their practices remain curiously under-explored in Nordic urban studies. Dialogue experts experience the practical dilemma of being experts in a practice that has developed as a reaction to expert-rule and top-down power. We inquire into this dilemma together with a group of dialogue experts who work within an urban development scheme in the district of Gottsunda in Uppsala, Sweden. We ask: how do dialogue experts make sense of their use of power in dialogues with citizens? We explore whether analysing dialogue practice through the concepts of power and justification might explain the practical dilemmas confronted by dialogue experts. By engaging in joint inquiry with the practitioners in a series of focus groups, we learn that the practitioners are inclined to critique power relations that exclude marginalised voices from urban planning but find it more difficult to justify their own use of power in pursuit of a more inclusive governance system. The dialogue experts employ two types of justification for their use of power: an advocative justification, which revolves around aspirations to change the planning system to include marginalised voices, and a more conventional bureaucratic justification, by which they merely execute the will of elected politicians and follow established planning procedures. Even so, the practitioners remain ambivalent about their use of power. Hence, we demonstrate how power theory and joint inquiry between practitioners and researchers can shed new light on the practical dilemmas in dialogue practice.
