User:TherealLiamplsc308/Participatory planning

A community involved in a participatory planning process

Participatory planning is an urban planning and community development paradigm that centers the involvement of local stakeholders in community planning processes that affect them directly. It is a broad and contested paradigm rather than a strictly defined theoretical framework, and it relates closely to more specifically defined planning paradigms such as advocacy planning and communicative planning. Participatory planning programs generally aim to synthesize the views of diverse stakeholders in a community, with particular attention to marginalized groups that may not be represented in traditional planning approaches.

Historical Context

Rational Planning Tradition

Prior to the 1970s, community planning was generally directed in a top-down way by experts, theorists, and trained professionals. Modern community planning developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the creation of planned industrial cities like Pullman, Chicago, and other planned communities like the garden cities of Sir Ebenezer Howard. In this era, the rational planning model was far and away the dominant paradigm in urban planning. Under this model, professional planners would identify an established set of goals for a project, rationally weigh a set of alternatives to achieve those goals, and then create and implement a plan accordingly.

Similarly hierarchical approaches to planning were implemented by colonial European powers in their creation of cities in the developing world. English planners in India, for instance, laid out many Indian cities, applying their own English methods of planning, and inserting their English priorities and commitments into the planning process. This often led to difficult tensions, where cities planned with an English context in mind were poorly suited to the particular social context in India. There were notable exceptions to this approach. Patrick Geddes was a radical urban planner for his time, who designed a number of cities in India, and was careful to prioritize the needs and cultural context of local residents in his plans. Geddes has since been claimed as a pioneer of the participatory planning paradigm.

This kind of top-down approach was dominant throughout the first half of the 20th century. However, from time to time planners attempted to integrate more participatory processes into their planning projects. In one notable example, after the bombing of British cities during World War II, planning advocates worked to engage the public in the reconstruction planning process. The planners created new techniques to, "communicate with laypeople, including mobilizing publicity, measuring public opinion, organizing exhibitions, and experimenting with new visual strategies" They also developed a forum to educate and ask the public about various plans and policies.

Emergence of Participatory Planning

In the 1960s and 70s, a wave of critical responses to these traditional frameworks broke into the mainstream. Scholars and community members alike criticized traditional planning methods as undemocratic and unresponsive to community needs. A series of landmark essays and publications began to develop a new framework for understanding urban planning. Paul Davidoff and Linda Davidoff developed the paradigm of advocacy planning, which involved a commitment to involving affected stakeholders in the planning process. In 1969, Sherry Arnstein wrote a landmark essay titled A Ladder of Citizen Participation, to create a typology of different forms of citizen involvement in municipal programs. These theories and ideas began to develop into a paradigm of participatory planning.

By the early 1970s the central ideas of participatory planning were being considered and discussed by the mainstream planning community. A 1971 U.S. Department of Transportation publication summarized seminars where professional planners, public administrators, and citizens debated the idea of participatory planning. The U.S. Department of Transportation recognized that citizens felt excluded from the current planning processes. In the seminar the following questions were asked: "Why do you want citizens to participate? What kind of citizens should be included? When should citizen participation enter the planning process? How do you organize citizen participation? How much power should be invested in citizen participation groups? Where do local elected officials fit in the citizen participation element? What are the responsibilities of the planner regarding citizen participation?". The consensus was that citizen participation is valuable for better planning as well as for minimizing confrontation; however, not everyone agreed about how to effectively involve citizens.

Since the 1970s, participatory planning has become an increasingly powerful paradigm in urban planning and community development, and is deeply influential on modern mainstream planning and international development projects.

Theoretical Framework

Participatory planning is a broad paradigm, rather than an explicitly defined theory, so it cannot be described with a singular and complete theory. There are several influential essays and theories which have shaped the contemporary participatory planning paradigm.

Advocacy Planning

Paul Davidoff laid out a theory of planning in his 1965 essay Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning, and developed it further throughout the 1960s along with his wife Linda Davidoff. Their work has developed into a highly influential paradigm of public participation in the planning process, referred to as advocacy planning.

Advocacy Planning responds to a recognition of traditional planning approaches as hierarchical and undemocratic. In his work, Davidoff acknowledges that planning processes are necessarily guided by a set of priorities and values, and that the specific set of priorities and values should guide the process is often a contentious question, especially among diverse interest groups in a community. With this in mind, Davidoff argues that planners should act as advocates. He suggests that several planners create distinct plans on behalf of different interest groups in a community according to their values and priorities, and then advocate for their plan relative to other possible plans.

This theory of planning represents one conception of what citizen participation in planning could mean, and has been very influential to the paradigm of participatory planning in general.

Shelly Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation

Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation

Responding to the persistent gap between local community needs, and traditional rationalistic approaches to planning, Sherry Arnstein wrote her essay A Ladder of Citizen Participation in 1969 to "encourage a more enlightened dialogue". The ladder is a typology of different levels of citizen participation in government programs.

She describes eight different forms of participation, arranged in three categories: non-participation, degrees of tokenism, and degrees of citizen power. She advocates that government projects and planning processes should involve the forms of citizen participation that she places higher on the ladder. Her critical assault has become highly influential on current theory and practice of citizen participation in government projects, and is an important piece of the participatory planning paradigm.

Methods/Tools

Participatory planning programs employ a wide range of methods and tools in order to facilitate public participation in the urban planning process. Many different organizations integrate participatory planning methods into their work, either conducting broad community planning, or conducting planning initiatives for a wide range of specific purposes such as forest management, natural disaster risk reduction, and ancient rock art management

Participatory Rural Appraisal

Participatory Rural Appraisal is a leading method of participatory planning, employed most often in the context of international community development. Participatory Rural Appraisal draws heavily on the work of Paulo Freire and his idea of critical consciousness, as well as Kurt Lewin's integration of democratic leadership, group dynamics, experiential learning, action research, and open systems theory. PRA has been modified and reframed in the related models of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Robert Chambers, an important early practitioner of Participatory Rural Appraisal outlines a "menu" of specific methods and techniques that are central to the broad technique of Participatory Rural Appraisal, including but not limited to:

• Semi-structured interviews
• Participatory mapping and modeling
• Time lines and trend and change analysis
• Transect walks
• Daily time-use analysis
• Institutional diagramming
• Matrix scoring and ranking
• Shared presentations and analysis
• Oral histories and ethno-biographies

E-Planning

Participatory e-planning is relatively new way to engage citizens in urban planning. E-participation is defined as "technology-mediated interaction between the civil society sphere and the formal politics sphere" According to Horelli and Wallin (2010), "participatory e-planning, similarly to e-participation, can be an important instrument of e-democracy and e-governance". Participatory e-planning is also related to engaging the general public to use tools traditionally used by urban planning experts, such as Geographic Information Systems and Planning Support Systems. Participatory e-planning research has focused on incorporating forms of participation with existing governance and urban planning processes. The e-planning research is also limited to needs of current participatory planning. The original investigations used tools like online questionnaires, surveys, and polls to consultant citizens. The feedback from participating citizens is then used or not used by experts and professionals. Before e-planning, citizens could provide only their opinion via direct confrontation, snail mail, phone calls, or e-mails. The e-planning participation tools allow for more organized and substantive participation from the interested public. The tools are:

1."Plans-on-the-map", which is a website that allows citizens to get acquainted with existing plans

2. "Tell-it-on-the-map", which is a questionnaire-based online tool to collect citizens' comments on specific issues presented by planners.

3. The planning competitions website, where citizens can get acquainted with ongoing planning competitions and comment on them.

These tools allow feedback, but still do not allow the public to spotlight issues they find important. Critiques challenge the e-planning tool to empower citizens to collaborate on the same level with experts. More and more citizens own devices that allow them to produce media. Participatory e-planning can not only use customary collaborative urban planning tools but must delve into sharing media content.