Identifying Misalignments between Public Participation Process and Context in Urban Development

Journal Title: UNKNOWN - Year 2017, Vol 5, Issue 2

Abstract

Public participation is a common element in state-of-the-art urban development projects. Tailoring the public participation process to the local context is a popular strategy for ensuring sufficient turnout and meaningful engagement, but this strategy faces several challenges. Through a review of case studies of public participation in urban development projects, we identify ten typical misalignments between the public participation process and the local context, including the lack of policy maker support, adverse personal circumstances of participants, low collaborative capacity, and mistrust, among others. When a public participation process is not aligned to the local context, the process may generate outcomes that compromise public interests, inequitably distribute benefits among stakeholders, or favor powerful private interests. This study offers caution and guidance to planning practitioners and researchers on how to contextualize public participation in urban development projects through the categorization of common misalignments that ought to be avoided.

Authors and Affiliations

Matthew Cohen, Arnim Wiek

Keywords

Related Articles

Identifying Context-Specific Categories for Visualizing Livability of Cities—a Case Study of Malmö

Livability is a concept being applied to cities, even though it is vague. Worldwide, there are several livable city ranking schemes in use, which compare the livability of cities by making use of standardized indicator s...

Agricultural Land and the New Urban Paradigm: Coexistence, Integration, or Conflict?

The relation between "urban" and "rural" has changed and developed over the last few decades. The present contribution focuses on how the relationship between these two entities has developed, highlighting how it corresp...

Identifying the “Usual Suspects”—Assessing Patterns of Representation in Local Environmental Initiatives

An increasing body of literature explores the role of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) in governing sustainable development. As associations, one key task of TMNs is to represent their members through production a...

Sustaining Welfare for Future Generations: A Review Note on the Capital Approach to the Measurement of Sustainable Development

Measuring sustainable development based on analytical models of growth and development and modern methods of growth accounting is an economic approach—often called the capital approach – to establishing sustainable devel...

Methodological Challenges in Sustainability Science: A Call for Method Plurality, Procedural Rigor and Longitudinal Research

Sustainability science encompasses a unique field that is defined through its purpose, the problem it addresses, and its solution-oriented agenda. However, this orientation creates significant methodological challenges....

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP219294
  • DOI 10.12924/cis2017.05020011
  • Views 167
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Matthew Cohen, Arnim Wiek (2017). Identifying Misalignments between Public Participation Process and Context in Urban Development. UNKNOWN, 5(2), 11-22. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-219294