Experiences of participatory planning in contexts of inequality: a qualitative study of urban renewal projects in Colombia (original) (raw)
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The Paradox of Participation: A Case Study on Urban Planning in Favelas and a Plea for Autonomy
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2012
The participatory planning method called Plano Global Específico (specific global plan, PGE) has been used in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) since 1995 for interventions in spontaneous settlements (favelas). Although the responsible municipal agency describes it very optimistically, inhabitants have manifested significant discontents. This paper focusses on the reasons for this controversial outcome, analysing the PGE method against the background of Brazilian re-democratisation and Belo Horizonte's public policies concerning favelas. The hypothesis confirmed by this case study is that institutionalised participation does not favour the qualitative leap towards citizen control or autonomy, but is essentially attached to heteronomous planning structures.
LOCAL INITIATIVE IN LOW INCOME SETTLEMENTS IN BOGOTA, COLOMBIA
Refereed E-Journal, Multi-Disciplinary Research in the Arts. UNESCO Observatory, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne (Australia), 2007
This paper discusses how community initiative urban, architectonic and/or environmental projects, can be better than those produced by public or private plans, in low-income settlements. Low-income settlements are peripheral and growing areas in Bogotá with huge shortfalls in economic and social terms, the same as in public services and infrastructure. These areas continue to grow in size without organised urban or economic policies and plans. Most of the organisation in these areas of urban growth is the informal planning of the people building. People themselves have built and improved their habitat, have built and shared their dreams and ideas about the future, have built a community vision and have used formal and informal participation channels to achieve their goals. This paper invites reconsideration of the role of people as leading actors in building, upgrading, and expressing their own urban environment.
Beyond the rhetoric of participation: New challenges and prospects for inclusive urban regeneration
We carry out a critical analysis of current participation practices in urban regeneration processes. Many concrete examples suffer from major flaws in terms of instrumental or ineffective involvement of parts of the community, and especially of the weakest and most deprived constituencies, at the advantage of more affluent and experienced ones, which are familiar enough with institutionalized public decision making to surf and manipulate the deliberation dynamics at their own advantage. Below a superficial rhetoric of inclusion, cosmetic forms of participation are therefore at risk of perpetuating and even exacerbating existing inequalities. We then explore new possibilities for more effective and sustainable forms of participation, most notably social storytelling, community informatics, and relational public art and culture projects. A new, interesting frontier of future experimentation in participation practices can be found in innovative forms of coalescence among these three streams of activity, as testified by a few state of the art pilot projects and experiences.
Community Participation in Urban Development: Integrating Community Participation and Ghettoization
The structural heterogeneity of formal and informal residential and economic spheres has continues to increase disparities and aggravate the social and environmental problems of the urban poor. In recent years, a shift has taken place to incorporate local communities as active partners into urban upgrading and development interventions. Urban development practices should benefit the ghetto society as much as it influencing others and the reason behind the urban restrictions in these societies should be scanned properly. In these societies, service provision depends very much on an efficient organization and to make best possible use of available material and human resources. The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of community level plans based on several projects studied to determine to what extend participation has been used or abused in planning practice. Rationale behind ghetto society and what causes people to opt for such localities restricting urban development. The methodology used in this paper is based on literature review backed-up with a survey.
Does Participation Really Matter in Urban Regeneration Policies?
In this article we focus our attention on the progressively prominence of the citizen participation into the networks of governance oriented toward urban regeneration. We expound the main results of our recent research carried out in 10 deprived neighborhoods in Catalonia (Spain), going in depth into three central issues: (1) the weight of citizen participation in the governance networks, (2) the substantive effects of this participation, and (3) the factors that influence the variety of experiences of participation in urban regeneration. We conclude that the development of participatory governance networks is dialectically related to policy outcomes and to prior structural elements like the position of the neighborhoods within the urban system or the availability and characteristics of the local social capital.
(In)Subordinate Planning: A Decolonial Tool for Marginalized Urban Areas
Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2024
The city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) has various socially and historically marginalized areas, such asperipheral neighborhoods and favelas, which lack traditional leisure and cultural spaces. Theseareas are often seen as subaltern, neglected by the state, and not sufficiently contemplated inpublic policies. Consequently, local inhabitants frequently have to come up with improvisedsolutions, using their own resources to design and build sociocultural spaces. While much hasbeen written about the practice of self-building in favelas, not enough research has been donefrom the urban planning/urban studies perspective pairing this practice with the decolonialtheory hailing from South America. This article aims to frame the collective self-building ofsociocultural spaces in favelas as a type of “insubordinate planning.” The concept of“insubordinate planning” is suggested here as part of a broader decolonial toolbox, regularly usedby marginalized urban communities to persist and ensure their right to the city. To illustrate theconnection between self-building, sociocultural spaces, insubordinate planning, and decolonialtheory, the case study of the Sitiê Park in the Vidigal Favela is presented. This study wasconducted through ethnography for a year and proves that decolonial principles are intrinsic tofavela dwellers when it comes to building persistent spaces.
Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management, 2018
In this chapter, we analyze the interactions between local governments and citizens’ initiatives. In the Netherlands, local governments take up the role of civic enabler based on a modest approach that leaves citizens room to invent and design initiatives on what they deem to be public issues by facilitating and activating their efforts. We focus on how a proactive form of this approach toward citizens’ initiatives in deprived neighborhoods affects citizen–government relations. Our research is based on a case study in the city of Amsterdam. We find that particularly more women and migrants took up a wide variety of initiatives, which suggests that the neighborhood approach is more inclusive than deliberative approaches. We also find that initiators developed a positive attitude toward public institutions that enable them and that they started to see frontline workers as collaborators in their initiatives with whom they could have personal and authentic interactions, as opposed to th...
Hybrid forms of civic participation in neighborhood redevelopment
The notion of community has enjoyed wide currency in neighborhood redevelopment in the US and UK, not only as part of a marketing rhetoric to sell cities but also as the cornerstone of initiatives guiding the revival of urban areas. Often, a call for civic initiative and participation is at the center of redevelopment discourse aiming to enlist residents in inner city neighborhoods to build community and participate in the governance of place-making. In this paper, our goal is to contribute to the growing body of critical commentary about the increased currency of community and civic participation in policies and programs, specifically in the context of neighborhood redevelopment. We are particularly interested in how potential tensions between the tasks of creating places of belonging and places of investment are resolved in the everyday conduct of citizens. Relying on longitudinal data from four low-income neighborhoods in the US Southeast that have participated in a funded redevelopment initiative, the analytic focus of the paper is on examining residents' efforts to 'build community'. Through a number of data vignettes, we illustrate how residents' seemingly mundane acts are motivated by simultaneous orientations toward communality, market-led development, and social justice. Their strategic stance toward neighborhood development is partly fuelled by institutional discourse that prioritizes 'outcomes'. At the same time, it is also symptomatic of neoliberalism as lived experience that is characterized by a need to negotiate hybrid and contradictory interests, motivations and outcomes.