Congratulations to Katrin Hofer on successfully defending her PhD!
Katrin Hofer has successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled "Towards a more nuanced understanding of public participation in urban development".
Katrin’s research engages with views of ordinary urban residents of an underprivileged residential area in Johannesburg, South Africa, and offers a fresh perspective on public participation in urban development. Her work challenges the traditional, often rigid, frameworks of participation by emphasizing the need to understand participation as a dynamic and context-dependent process.
One of her key contributions is the development of the 3A3-framework, which unpacks the concept of participation along three dimensions: Actors, Arenas, and Aims. Her findings reveal that public participation is not just a procedural formality but an ongoing relationship and trust-building process between the state and its citizens. Through a mixed-methods approach, Katrin demonstrated how residents from an underprivileged area perceive participatory processes, often diverging from conventional understandings of participation in urban development literature. Her research underscores the importance of recognizing and incorporating multiple understandings of participation to make urban development more inclusive and effective.
