Giving civil participation a fair shot

Abstract

Citizen participation is frequently mentioned in debates about our urban environment but proves difficult to be meaningful in practice. Often, participation is characterised by intransparency, poor communication and distrust. It is a loss seen the potential positive effects of influential civil participation that could help us overcome problems regarding the increasing complexity of cities. Enabling the potential and making citizen participation a valuable asset demands the extra step; full facilitation.

The research’s aim is to understand how participation needs to be facilitated to make it worthwhile. Therefore, the following research question is formulated: How can Rotterdam facilitate and structure co-creation in the built environment in an inclusive, supportive, human-oriented and meaningful way? Although the outcome of this research reaches beyond Rotterdam, will Rotterdam be used as research subject.

To answer this research question, current context and good practices are analysed. Additionally, a real-life street experiment in the Old North of Rotterdam has been conducted. The context analyses consist of the current approach of Rotterdam in facilitating participation in the city, interviews about participation with urban and architectural firms in Rotterdam, and current programmes and strategies. Relevant good practices outside of Rotterdam are analysed for valuable lessons and used as input for the design. The experiment consists of the regeneration of a street, in which the process and co-creation were vital elements. The outcome of this research consists of recommendations and a design proposal. The main recommendation for Rotterdam is to communicate more about the process and the assessment of proposals. The design proposes a next step in the appropriation of public space by residents. This appropriation is guided by design coaches connected to the municipality. Currently available, as well as newly created space, is used to demonstrate the strategic design proposal.

Conclusion; facilitating participation in urban developments is strongly connected to actively guiding and initiating processes, good communication and transparency. For the design; to keep it tangible and make people take ownership of their surroundings, process scales should not be larger than the scale of the neighbourhood. Integrating participation into society needs to be done step by step but with complete commitment. Participation is not about saving money, but rather a new way of approaching design processes.

One of the main dilemmas in participation remains not being able to attract unusual suspects. The personal door-to-door approach connected people to the process, but not as active participants. Analysing digital tools will be interesting for follow-up research in this regard. Overall, analyses of existing practices remain an interesting way to learn