Public Participation in Urban Planning

Introduction

Over the last sixty years, participation has evolved into standard rhetoric in different disciplines, including urban planning, political science and development studies, and has become a mainstream feature of governance in many parts of the world. However, while participation is typically recognised as a distinct practice, it is rarely explicitly defined; it remains abstract and encompasses a variety of meanings and forms. As a result, some scholars refer to participation as engagement, co-creation, collaboration, consultation or deliberation and the term is used for almost every interaction with individuals or groups in planning.

This doctoral research project aims at contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the concept of participation in both theory and practice. Accordingly, the project engages with the concept of participation in two different ways: (1) through a conceptual approach, which is focused on the development of a conceptual framework of participation; and (2) through empirical research, engaging with people’s preferences of state-led participatory processes. This empirical part focuses on Johannesburg, South Africa. Public participation in local planning was a promise of the first democratic government in South Africa. Despite efforts for engaging civil society in local governance, participatory schemes largely fail to achieve what they were set out to accomplish. This provides an interesting context to investigate people’s preferences of state-led participatory processes.

The Project

The first part of the project, the conceptual approach, attempts to systematise knowledge of participation by bringing together existing concepts and theories from multiple academic fields with a particular focus on literature from planning theory and practice and development studies. Through theory synthesis, the project aims at offering a new and enhanced conceptualisation of the phenomenon of participation in the form of a novel framework of participation. The framework should provide a tool, which helps to understand participation as it emerges, and not necessarily as it should be, while doing justice to the diversity of forms participation may take.

The empirical part of the project is conducted in Johannesburg. Public participation in local planning was a promise of the first democratic government in South Africa. Despite efforts for engaging civil society in local governance, participatory schemes largely fail to achieve what they were set out to accomplish. This project contributes to the rich collection of research on participatory urban governance in South Africa by exploring state-led participatory processes from the people’s perspective. The overall aim is to explore people’s preferences of formalised participatory processes for local infrastructure and housing provision. A particular focus lies on gaining a better understanding of people’s relationship with the state and how this shapes people’s understandings and preferences of state-led participatory processes. In order to do so, this research project follows a sequential multi-method research design combining statistical analysis of survey data (incl. a factorial survey experiment) with case-study analysis (based on focus group discussions).

Bringing the findings from the two parts together, this research project contributes to a more nuanced discussion of how participation may evolve across and within different contexts. This can lead to a better understanding of the nature of participation in both theory and practice and thus might better inform when, where and how the concept is functional to be used or under which circumstances it should be avoided.
 

Actors, arenas and aims: A conceptual framework for public participation

Katrin Hofer and David Kaufmann
Planning Theory, vol. 22: no. 4, pp. 357-379, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2022.
DOI: external page10.1177/14730952221139587call_made

Public support for participation in local development

Katrin Hofer, Michael Wicki and David Kaufmann
World Development, vol. 178, pp. 106569, Elsevier, 2024.
DOI: external page10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106569call_made