The Dialogue of the City

Abstract

Participatory processes have become unexceptional in Dutch planning. Due to the communicative turn in urban planning, collaborative planning moved up on the local and national government agenda: in 2021 the new environmental act will come into place, which firmly encourages participation in an early stage of the process. Within those participatory processes, face-to-face contact is currently indisputably the most used method. Practitioners believe that increasing the moments of contact is the best strategy to quickly reach consensus, even though only half of the participating citizens say that it indeed contributes to mutual trust and understanding. And although citizen participation is not something new in the Netherlands, its effectiveness leaves much to be desired. Despite the increase of attention for citizen engagement, the actual interaction between citizen and urban planner has not been studied extensively. Why and how to arrange a productive interaction with citizens is not clearly stated in literature nor known from practice. This leaves spatial planners with a large uncertainty on how to employ dialogue in daily practice. Therefore, the central question in this double degree thesis revolves around the face-to-face interaction between urban planners and citizens. It researches the gap between the ideal but rather theoretical concept of dialogue with citizens and the unruly reality of practice. It focuses on how the urban planner should manage the dilemmas of dialogue and how he/she could facilitate this interaction in an effective way, in order to let the process contribute to something constructive. Dialogical principles were taken as starting point and experts were consulted about dialogue in participation’s functioning in practice. The generic framework which results from this, is applied in the case of the redevelopment of Delft Campus station. That is done by developing a game for the interaction between citizens and planner, which served as input for the spatial design which followed. By developing and reflecting on these three different products - the general framework, the game and the spatial design - the thesis provides practitioners with an advice how to deal with the complex conversations which they have to deal with today.