Search

In response to criticism, greenfield smart and sustainable city developers have paid increasing attention to their social impact by prioritizing placemaking and citizen involvement in their planning and development. However, citizens' participation remains limited, and little is known about their everyday experiences, perceptions, and communities. While cultural mapping is an established process to build communities and articulate their identity, it has rarely been used in greenfield developments. This paper presents the Kashiwanoha Monogatari Project to demonstrate that cultural mapping can strengthen community ties and encourage citizen participation in new smart urban development. The paper details the cultural mapping project and its outputs, including lessons learned about citizen perception of their smart city. The findings suggest that cultural mapping provides citizens and planners with tools to visualize their emerging place-based narratives and communities by providing an alternative approach to co-creation with citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether endemic or overt, conflict is an intrinsic part of policymaking. Public participation promises to give a place to those conflicts in a more inclusive and productive way. Previous research has primarily focused on the substance and discourse of conflict, studying what conflicts are about and how actors give meaning to conflicts. Less attention has been given to how conflicts are enacted and performed when citizens and the state meet. Using a dramaturgical approach, this paper explores how the performances, staging practices, and scenography of public participation influence policy conflicts. The research concentrates on two contentious urban projects in the Belgian city of Genk, employing ethnographic observation of participatory moments to expose the performative elements of participation. The analysis uncovers the artifacts and communicative methods that narrow the conflict scope, determine the micro-politics of the participatory meetings, and influence whose voices are heard. Using a dramaturgical analysis framework sheds light on some underexplored, micro-level dynamics of participatory efforts that may limit the scope of policy conflict. Understanding these micro-mechanisms is essential for a more inclusive and equitable urban transformation policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The importance of integrated urban management has become increasingly evident in today’s world, particularly for large cities facing physical, spatial, and demographic growth and complexity. In Iran, the lack of effective citizen participation and integrated management has posed a significant challenge to the urban management system. To address this issue, this research focuses on the role of citizens and urban activists in various levels of Tehran metropolis management, including policy making, planning, supervision, and control. It also evaluates the legislative and executive layers to emphasize their importance in achieving effective urban management. METHODS: The present study adopts a qualitative research design, with a practical orientation in terms of its objectives, and an analytical-exploratory approach for data collection. The study focuses on experts and city managers as the statistical population of interest. To gather data, a questionnaire was developed and distributed among the target community. The reliability of the questionnaire was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, which yielded a high value of 0.97. Data analysis involved the use of descriptive statistics, including frequency, frequency percentage, mean, and standard deviation, as well as inferential statistics, specifically the one-sample t-test. The statistical analysis was conducted using the SPSS software package. FINDINGS: According to the findings, 31.4% of the responses identified the citizens and 25.7% of the responses identified the municipality as the owner of the city. 68.6% of the answers have identified the municipality as the manager of Tehran city. Also, 80% of the respondents said that management fragmentation is the biggest challenge of urban development in Iran. The most influential institutions in the process of urban management are Tehran Municipality at the policy-making level, self-governing experts and researchers at the planning level, the Tehran Islamic Council at the monitoring and control level, the Islamic Council at the legislative level and Tehran Municipality at the executive level, while the citizens are the last. CONCLUSION: The present urban management approach faces significant obstacles in the form of fragmentation and inadequate coordination among decision-making entities. These challenges result in disarray, duplication of efforts, and squandering of resources. Consequently, the absence of transparency and lucidity in the roles of city proprietors and managers, coupled with the lack of precise delineations for the engagement of organizations, individuals, and institutions in the urban management process, could impede the attainment of sustainable development objectives and curtail the capacity of civil society to comprehend and partake in effective urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Plan Canada is the property of Canadian Institute of Planners and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Town of Bamberg has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993 due to its medieval urban layout and its well preserved buildings mostly from the Middle Ages and the Baroque era. A large part of the historic streets and squares still exist. They make up an essential part of the city's public space. Yet, the demands placed on this public space are currently undergoing some changes - especially under the influence of climate change and the Corona pandemic. In line with the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, Bamberg's urban fabric is based on the historical stratification of cultural and natural values and features. The urban fabric relates to the landscape in which it is embedded - river Regnitz and the surrounding hills - as well as to religious traditions, trade activities and building customs. The aim of this paper is to analyze recent developments in the planning and use of public spaces in Bamberg taking into account current methods of participation. In 2020, the City of Bamberg was awarded the contract by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, for Construction and Home Affairs, for a project period of seven years as part of the "Smart Cities Model Projects" funding programme to promote digitalization at all levels of urban development. Accordingly, the contribution of digital technologies to urban planning and of citizen participation will receive special attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of ICT to optimize urban processes, activities, efficiency and effectiveness of services turns cities into smart. Smart cities make it necessary to plan, monitor and analyze the city, except for the routine functions of the city. The study examined what smart city research projects are in five representative smart cities (London, New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and Istanbul) and whether there are similarities or differences in background assumptions. The literature used has a global reach; cities around the world have been chosen for comparison. By evaluating the existing literature, it has been evaluated that smart cities are the most successful and the weakest issues. Despite the centrality of New York and London's smart city policies; they are fairly superior in economic competition. Public participation in smart city projects is already weak in Singapore and Istanbul. Barcelona has a more participatory policy than other cities, but it needs to develop a smart governance perspective. The study concludes with how the smart city ideology achieves its goals. The study adds value to smart city research by a critical look at the subject. Combining the results of practical smart city initiatives, it concludes the practicality and usefulness of smart city development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighbourhood groups are a feature of municipal politics across Canada yet are understudied in mid-sized cities. They are often portrayed as a mechanism for allowing residents to be more engaged in decisions affecting their neighbourhoods and to improve municipal decisions by incorporating the lived experience of municipal residents into that decision-making. It is therefore important to examine the formation of neighbourhood groups, whether they influence municipal decisions, and whether they are representative of their neighbourhoods. This article examines these issues through a case study of four neighbourhood groups in Windsor, Ontario. Using interview data as well as analysis of primary and secondary sources, it examines the top-down and grassroots forces that shaped these groups and their involvement in council decisions relating to vacant buildings in the city. The conclusions reached are that there were clear limits to the influence that they exerted on municipal decision-making. These groups did represent the interests of their communities and, when provided with external resources to develop their institutional capacity, they did help promote municipal policy change. This was, however, incremental change at the margins of the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of modern planning in the early twentieth century and its failure in practice caused the emergence of a planning crisis which theory-practice gap has been its central theme of debate. This gap begot various readings of urban planning theory to make theory and practice much closer. Radical planning, as one of these readings, deprives the power of central government in favour of empowering the citizens and considers the highest level of participation in decision-making processes for them. Nevertheless, it failed to address the planning crisis and theorists continued theory making to address the crisis. Hence, the current study aims to investigate radical planning with a critical perspective by using a deep-seated research method and referring to related topics. Results ended in finding reasons led to the failure of radical planning to address the planning crisis. The uncertainty of the radical planning process, the idealistic looks of theorists and radical planning mismatch with the current forms of state planning are three main reasons which hindered it from addressing planning crisis despite being the turning point of urban planning theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Landscape Architecture Frontiers is the property of Higher Education Press Limited Company and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The smart city has been both celebrated for opening up decision-making processes through responsive digital infrastructures, and criticised for turning citizens into mere nodes of socio-technical networks under corporate or government control. In line with these depictions, smart city politics is often analysed as a struggle between aspirations for bottom-up participatory democracy and authoritarian control. Drawing on ethnographic research on an Amsterdam project which encourages citizens to collect and share air quality data, we problematise this vertical reading of smart city politics. The project mobilises both republican citizenship and cybernetic citizenship, each assuming different logics regarding the ways in which citizens negotiate urban life by means of data and sensing technologies. While republican citizenship emphasises citizens' sovereignty, cybernetic citizenship emphasises their immersion into informational environments. We demonstrate how, depending on specific situated interests and forms of engagement, both kinds of citizenship feed into appealing visions of urban life for different actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-based citizenship (city-zenship) and its ecological ramifications increasingly inform people's social and political lives, rendering the link between ecological citizenship and political city-zenship a topical subject for analysis. The questions analyzed here are: How can and how do citizens of cities promote sustainable urban development? What are their goals and motivations? And how do these forms of engagement reflect the theory of ecological citizenship in cities? The research is based on semi-structured and in-depth interviews with environmental and political activists in German and Israeli cities. The analysis indicates that the city is a meaningful political arena for ecological citizenship, with distinct patterns of political participation in relation to a city's particular identity. However, political participation in cities is not independent of the state, but dependent on the political and civic rights enshrined therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article probes the Israeli 'Clearance and Construction' urban regeneration programme, which encourages apartment owners nationwide to turn their old dwellings into new tower-clusters. By comparing distinct planning communications on such projects, we aim to contribute a class-related perspective to the debate on post-politics in planning. Planning literature addresses the neutralizing effects of the neoliberal ethos on urban regeneration, highlighting the techniques through which planners dismiss community needs, use values and local voices. We respond to scholars calling for more nuanced perspectives by analysing a dataset of objection hearings in different cities, tracing how planners present their decisions and advance projects, and how different social groups accept and/or reject planners' rationale. Our findings point to two main outcomes: first, we show that most participants accept the entrepreneurial rationale but their discourse often mixes acceptance with dissent; second, we show that such mixed discourses vary across locations and reflect socio-spatial distinctions. The more affluent participants objected more and highlighted use values and the public interest, yet their discourse largely echoed planners' discourses. Conversely, the poorer objectors, who focused on exchange values, disrupted the consensual planning order by highlighting their own hopes and personal struggles. Who, then, were more submissive to neoliberal ethos? These results, we argue, call for a nuanced analysis of current planning relations. We argue that such analysis should specifically look at synchronization between consensual planning and co-optation, dissent and socio-spatial deviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a summary of Georgia General Assembly Senate Bill (S.B.) 263 which authorizes the creation of the city of Eagle's Landing, Georgia by the residents of Stockbridge, Georgia who wish to secede, and it mentions municipal boundaries and local government law.

In response to the mounting criticism of emerging 'smart cities' strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on 'smart citizens'. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper argues for an attention to the 'actually existing smart citizen', who plays a much messier and more ambivalent role in practice. This paper proposes the dual figures of 'the general citizen' and 'the absent citizen' as a heuristic for thinking about how the lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn for citizens, both discursively and materially, in the actual making of the smart city. These figures are meant to highlight how the universal and unspecified figure of 'the citizen' is discursively deployed to justify smart city policies, while at the same time, actual citizens remain largely excluded from such decision and policy-making processes. Using a case study of Atlanta, Georgia and its ongoing smart cities initiatives, we argue that while the participation of citizens is crucial to any truly democratic mode of urban governance, the emerging discourse around the promise of smart citizenship fails to capture the realities of how citizens are actually discussed and enrolled in the making of these policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this document is to propose a methodology for tourism planning that provides better management tools by strengthening government performance and promoting citizen participation. The methodology consisted in search of specialized information to identify the characteristics of different methodologies for the tourist planning, as well as the positions that define the scopes of the participation of the State in the management of development in a globalized context and pre-eminence of market. The results indicate that the planning of the sector is characterized by economic and centralist approach that favors the exclusion of social actors and does not take into account the environmental, economic, social and institutional aspects of the region. The proposed model combines spatial, regional and strategic aspects for the development of tourism and highlights coordination activities that from the public sphere should be promoted to generate governance and citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban policies are increasingly localized, stressing the role of neighbourhood social contacts in generating cohesion and citizen participation. Studies on ‘everyday’ multiculturalism also emphasize the neighbourhood as a meaningful place for encounters. However, there remains a lack of understanding of how specific contexts condition encounters with difference. We compare two European neighbourhoods that provide different contexts for participation: Amsterdam and Vienna. We ask how residents experience local spaces of encounter and how this influences their experience of the neighbourhood. We find a mismatch between the aims of local policies and the experiences of residents, who also value more superficial contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been widespread recognition in the Global South of the role of participatory governance approaches to urban development in responding to citizens’ immediate concerns. However, critiques note that participatory initiatives are often avenues for the political and economic elite to ensure their interests and profits, rather than improving the livelihoods in non- serviced urban peripheries. This article investigates how transition management (TM), as a promising participatory governance framework, can be implemented effectively to improve access to water for disadvantaged groups. First, we highlight lessons learnt from the TM applications in urban and water sectors. Second, we draw on empirical data from low-income urban areas in Ghana and Tanzania to bring the importance of social relations to the fore. By employing open-ended interviews, following the water points and conducting narrative walks, we identify three precautions that need to be addressed through adaptations of the TM approach in order to achieve the emancipatory promises of participatory governance models. In suggesting some guidelines for facilitators and active groups in participatory arenas, we discuss the importance of power dynamics in the communities, potentials and shortcoming of reflexive governance processes, and the need for capacity-building in transition teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • CDD does not incorporate the emancipatory politics that made PB successful. • KALAHI-CIDDS improved the poor’s income but there is elite control. • No improvement in the poor’s trust, solidarity and access to basic social services. • Failure to sustain participation of the poor casts doubt in the success of CDD. Abstract Community-driven development (CDD) has been identified as a potent vehicle for poverty reduction. Over 105 countries have adopted CDD projects in the hope that citizen empowerment translates to socio-economic development. But existing evidence is mixed, with some scholars arguing that CDD does not benefit the poor. This paper seeks to contribute to this literature by identifying any differentiated impact to the poor attributable to a CDD project in the Philippines. It draws on the literature on participatory budgeting to argue that participation of the socially excluded groups like the poor in the collective planning and budgeting determines the extent to which empowerment and democratization can be sustained. Using panel data collected in 2003 and 2010, the paper finds indications of elite control based on a decomposition of the profile of participants of village assemblies, which is a critical participatory institution in providing equal access to all members of the community to the deliberations and negotiations. The average participant of such village assemblies tend to be the less-poor household of the community with the participation of the poor dwindling over the years. The difference-in-difference impact estimation also reveals disappointing results for the poor. Although the project improved average household income among the poor, the project failed to enhance the social outcomes for the poor households such as participation in planning process, trust in the government and solidarity. This study adds to the existing literature showing that CDD may fail to effectively target the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Multi-stakeholder spaces allow participants to elucidate transition dynamics in an urban context. • Participants in multi-stakeholder spaces examine how innovative sustainability solutions impact urban transitions. • Engaging with transition initiatives requires building trust and transparency about the benefits for participation. • New roles and practices for researchers are required for examining how diverse actors contribute to urban transitions. Abstract This viewpoint presents insights on designing, engaging with and researching multi-stakeholder engagement spaces based on the experience of the ARTS project (2014–2016), active in five European cities also relevant for a broader European scale. We argue that those spaces represent an important new instrument of participatory governance that can elucidate the way different actors like community initiatives relate to and employ planning and policy contexts for working towards sustainable urban futures. The multi-stakeholder engagement spaces are analyzed regarding three functions they fulfill: co-creating new knowledge for action, making sense of contemporary transitions, and, exploring how sustainable solutions impact transitions. The lessons learned focus on the roles of different actors within those spaces as well as the link between the multi-stakeholder engagement spaces and a broader local context. We name three caveats including deeply entrenched mistrust between local transition initiatives and local government representatives, existing power imbalances and inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to analyse, criticize and recommend urban planning tools for the main actors and stakeholders involved in the planning process using a mixture of techniques such as remote sensing, GIS, Web-GIS, crowdsourcing in order to support availability of data and the transparency of the decision making process. The paper attempts to gather a list of proper urban planning measures for the specified objective based upon the results attained in the "Urban Climate Study of Bucharest" project financed by a Romanian-Swiss Program, which focused on the study of characteristics such as urban development, land use, urban sprawl, urban heat island and green space situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A green city becomes the one of the adaptation strategies which is responsive to the impact of climate change. A green city is an urban development concept which puts forward aspects of sustainability. The placement of sustainable development as a basic principle of a green city, then demands the existence of the participation from the community. The objectives of this research were to describe and analyze community participation in Green City Action Plan in Tulungagung. This research used descriptive research method with qualitative approach and qualitative data analysis of interactive model. The research results showed that the community participation process could be formed because of the existence of community's opportunity, ability and will to participate. Degree of community participation was on degree of participation. The existence of community's willingness and the Central Government's commitment to support the participation became the supporting factors. Meanwhile, the community's dependence on the government and management which was not optimal yet became the inhibiting factors of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban planning galleries are interpretive spaces that assert the state’s vision for the city. Ostensibly public showcases of a city’s past, present, and future, state administrations use these sites for specific purposes. On the one hand, planning galleries are designed to convince the public, tourists, and investors that their cities are aspiring towards a greater and more optimistic future. On the other hand, these galleries imply to visitors that the state holds extensive spatial knowledge about their territory—in essence, planning galleries are a material and discursive assertion of state sovereignty. Such assertions are a reaction to shifts in the state-civil society relationship, and represent the state’s desire to have citizens appreciate the challenges of urban management—to see like the city. This paper evaluates the Singapore City Gallery (SCG)—a performative space maintained by the Urban Redevelopment Authority that reasserts the state’s vision for Singapore. I argue that sites like the SCG are significant for understanding how cities are being made through negotiation between the state and diverse publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is motivated by the concept that the successful, effective, and sustainable implementation of the smart city paradigm requires a close cooperation among researchers with different, complementary interests and, in most cases, a multidisciplinary approach. It first briefly discusses how such a multidisciplinary methodology, transversal to various disciplines such as architecture, computer science, civil engineering, electrical, electronic and telecommunication engineering, social science and behavioral science, etc., can be successfully employed for the development of suitable modeling tools and real solutions of such sociotechnical systems. Then, the paper presents some pilot projects accomplished by the authors within the framework of some major European Union (EU) and national research programs, also involving the Bologna municipality and some of the key players of the smart city industry. Each project, characterized by different and complementary approaches/modeling tools, is illustrated along with the relevant contextualization and the advancements with respect to the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how the revitalization of archaeological areas, might be a pivotal element to sustainable development. Following this objective, the paper explores the procedure of inserting a new function in the case of the archaeological park of Apollonia, in Albania and consists of a detailed analysis of the transformative changes brought by its spatial integration. For this reason, the paper presents the issues and challenges of the archaeological site and explores the implications of the transformation of this area towards a 'learning environment'. The analysis shows that public participatory activities, because of the establishment of a Creativity Center, may lead to a transformative planning process and generate, therefore, the context for the 'territorial management planning strategies' index. Through this instance, the meaning and value of the area becomes apparent and offers valuable insights for its future redevelopment process. This article is the result of a research developed at the University of Guglielmo Marconi. The project involved researchers from different departments also with the involvement of postgraduate students from the International Masters in Interior Design of the same university. As such, it presents the elaboration of different themes: urban planning, territorial sustainability and socio-cultural development of the archaeological areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The critical literature on participation warns that a focus on 'consensus' evades the political in planning, preventing citizens from confronting and challenging discourse and prevailing orthodoxy about the way the urban ought to be constituted. These critiques raise important questions about the efficacy of participatory planning and its political formation. Moreover, the extent to which citizen's participation can ever challenge dominant trajectories has reached a point of conceptual 'crisis'. In this article, I explore the different ways in which participation manifests from the politicising participatory moments in planning. Examining a single case study in Melbourne, Australia, I draw upon 15 key informant interviews with community campaigners who mounted a successful campaign to defeat the controversial East West Link road project. By examining the formal and informal political manifestations of participation over a period of 2 years, this article challenges the sentiment that there is a crisis of participatory planning. It shows how decisions to engage the citizenry in prescribed ways induce other manifestations and formations of citizen's participation through politics and how these manifestations garner a pervasive and influential trajectory to reshape participatory planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politiques Sociales is the property of Service Social dans le Monde, asbl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The academic interest in social concepts in city contexts, such as sense of place and social capital, has been growing in the last decades. We present a systematic literature review that confirms the strong relationship between sense of place and social capital, from a social sciences point-of-view. It also reveal that little attention has been paid to their spatial dimensions at the urban level, thereby missing the chance to exploit socio-spatial knowledge to improve the day-to-day life in and functioning of the city (e.g. in planning processes, citizen participation, civic engagement). We therefore examine sense of place and social capital from a Geographic Information Science (GISc) viewpoint, and present a formal conceptualization and initial theoretical framework which explicitly describes both concepts, and the relation between them, within the context of a city and from a spatial point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to enable appropriate citizen engagement and user participation in urban development projects, knowledge is needed about the availability of tools and methods and their applicability to the different stages of a design or planning process. However, a systematic overview of the various digital and non-digital approaches for public participation is still missing. Addressing this shortcoming, we have summarized state-of-the-art instruments for participatory urban design in Germany, and summarized them by the means of a comprehensive and comparative database. To establish the database, we have analyzed participation guidelines published by 30 German municipalities and catalogued the tools and methodologies in use there. Information could be gathered on 70 different methods and tools of different levels of complexity. The approaches were classified inter alia by the level of engagement, plus 13 other categories. All findings were compiled into a data structure, giving basic information on the methods, links to reference documents, and sample projects. Our investigation has given evidence that certain methods are well known and widely applied by municipalities and stakeholder groups, while other more ambitious approaches are used only by larger and more resourceful cities. To the latter class, many digital tools belong. – The database is intended as search tool and information base for stakeholders who want to search and compare different participatory approaches. It is a key component for a process design tool enabling planners, authorities and managers for the design of participatory processes that can correspond closely to specific contexts. Being associated to the EU H2020 project “U_CODE Urban Collective Design Environment”, the database will be launched 2017 on the project website www.u-code.eu . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contractual agreements are becoming increasingly important for city governments seeking to manage urban development. Contractual governance involves direct relations between the local state and different public and private actors and citizens. Although abundant literature exists on public–private partnerships related to urban development projects, agreements made between citizens, interest organizations and market parties, such as Community Benefits Agreements remain under-explored and under-theorized. While it may seem that the state is absent from contemporary forms of contractual governance, such agreements remain highly intertwined with government policies. The central aim of this paper is to better conceptualize Community Benefits Agreement practices in order to build understanding of how contractual governance caters for direct end-user involvement in urban development, and to yield insights into its potential as to render development processes more inclusive. Based on academic literature in planning and law, expert interviews and several case studies in New York City, this paper conceptualizes end-user involvement in urban development projects and innovates within urban planning and governance theory through the use of two new concepts—project collectivity and the image of a fourth chair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child-Friendly Cities were conceived as a means to integrate children's rights into city decision-making and governance. Participatory research about child-friendly cities consistently finds overarching themes across ages and regions: children desire access to services, nature, and play; freedom from physical danger; and opportunities for inclusion within the city. This article explores a two-year visioning and participatory design process that engaged approximately 225 young people, aged 4–16, in the planning and design of a prominent public space in the City of Boulder. While participatory research with children has received much attention in the academic literature, much less attention has been given to what can be achieved through sustained integration of children into municipal planning processes, particularly in the USA. This paper thus moves children's participation beyond rhetoric and into the challenging reality of planning a city with children as a valued constituent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use is a key component to the sustainability of a city. Land-use planning policy should not be based solely on the hard figures, but also needs observational insights. Existing assessment methods and corresponding indexes may not provide comprehensive evaluation on sustainability practices. Therefore, a qualitative, comprehensive method is required to supplement sustainable land-use evaluation. This study developed a comprehensive evaluation framework embracing views from experts and the public for assessing land-use sustainability and applied it to the case of Hong Kong. Experts were interviewed to explain the relationship between land-use transition and impact factors, and through questionnaire survey, residents provided their ranking scores on the economic, environmental, and social performances to land-use change. A subsequent investigation was then conducted to understand/validate the different opinions given by experts and residents on sustainability. Finally, according to the questionnaire, survey, and supplementary investigation, the evaluation results were calculated and public evaluation criteria were formulated. The result also shows that Hong Kong’s land-use change in 2000–2010 is only marginally sustainable, with Open space to the best and decreased Grassland to the worst. The primary criteria of public requirement in economic, environmental, and social aspects are promoted productivity and labor force, extended natural space, and available resources. The proposed qualitative evaluation framework could be used to obtain the public view on the whole city’s land-use performance, providing new perspectives for planners and decision makers to move a city toward more sustainable land use by mitigating negative impacts, encouraging the most sustainable land-use, and balancing economic, environmental,javascript:affAutoSplit(); and social effects. In addition, criteria for land-use assessment developed from a new perspective can be applied in China’s urban systems for sustainability assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reconstruct the innovation journey of ‘citizen panels’, as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of aggregation leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 1980s, to the disembedding and proliferation of procedural formats in the 1990s, and into the trans-local consolidation of participatory practices through laboratory-based expertise since about 2000. Our account highlights a central irony: anti-technocratic engagements with governance gave birth to efforts at establishing technoscientific control over questions of political procedure. But such efforts have been met with various forms of reflexive engagement that draw out implications and turn design questions back into matters of concern. An emerging informal assessment regime for technologies of participation as yet prevents closure on one dominant global design for democracy beyond the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities were fundamental to the rise of the black power movement in the late 1960s, but, as Brian D. Goldstein uncovers, the built environment also served as a crucial medium through which black power proponents imagined the future that would follow from racial self-determination. As the case of Harlem shows, activist architects and planners and their community partners crafted an urban vision that valued existing African American residents and preserved their vibrant neighborhoods. In doing so, they not only offered a rebuke to modernist city building, with its emphasis on clearance and redevelopment, but they also played a thus-far-overlooked role in crafting a new, postmodern urbanism in its place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to present the development od public participation in local spatial planning in Poland. An assessment was made of the procedure of preparing planning documents and forms of their consultation with residents. To achieve this goal, use was made of the results of a survey research conducted among participants of public consultations in Poznań in the years 2012-2014. It is stressed that it is necessary to improve the decision-making process in urban spatial planning by accommodating not only traditional but also new forms and instruments of public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities across the globe are focusing on the needs of young people and their families in an effort to create child- and youth-friendly cities. In an attempt to become more child and youth friendly, over 40 communities in the United States have developed youth master plans (YMPs), as of 2009; however, our understanding of these plans is limited. To broaden this understanding, this research employed a multiple-methods approach, including an online questionnaire, plan analysis and semi-structured interviews with key community informants. Findings show that YMPs often focus on collaboration among community entities and youth participation, yet include only general normative statements regarding the physical environment. Furthermore, urban planners do not typically take the lead in development of YMPs, and, in some cases, are not involved at all. To inform and improve future YMPs, this paper recommends greater focus on the physical environment, particularly in relation to safety, access to nature and sustainable transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current public participation methods are laborious, reach few participants and are ineffective at gathering usable information for planning. This situation leads often to mistrust and dissatisfaction in the process and outcome. This article identifies the critical conditions for meaningful use of public participation GIS (PPGIS) tools to support the making of master plan in Helsinki. With PPGIS tools, residents’ insight of their living environment can be reached and utilized along the planning process. The results are divided to conceptual and empirical points. Whereas the conceptual points emphasize better understanding of the locus of the PPGIS tools in planning process, the empirical findings reveal new ways to study how residents’ perceptions align with the plan proposal. Though new tools, data and analysis can support representativeness, independence, early involvement, influence and transparency, planners and residents need more understanding of the benefits of these tools. The study indicates that though planners found the collected data and the analysis valuable, they still lacked the skills and institutional motivation to use the data effectively. The results point out that when PPGIS tools can be integrated to the mainstream planning practices, the tools have the ability to evolve to a more comprehensive participatory planning support system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Problem, research strategy, and findings:Historic preservation and planning often operate together in the United States within local planning departments, sharing some common roots and a "fragile, uneasy alliance" (Birch & Roby, 1984). Over time, developments in both preservation and planning brought these disciplines and professions closer together, including shared concern for sustainability and common ground in community economic development, revitalization, land use planning, and urban design. Simultaneously, areas of tension and potential conflict emerged. Some preservation-oriented scholars and practitioners call for the expansion of preservation's sphere of influence and concern, while others caution of negative effects. In this literature review, I identify areas of confluence and friction, as well as silences and gaps, focusing especially on planning and preservation literature since the 1980s. Takeaway for practice:Few scholars have identified what planners and preservationists (and those who do both) can learn from one another, with some important exceptions. Planning scholarship can benefit from understanding how preservation has changed in tandem and in relation to planning. Preservationists can gain much from incorporating contemporary planning theory, especially with regard to participation and building an equity agenda for preservation that builds from preservation's strengths and recent advances toward recognizing a wider, more representative set of historic resources. Both planners and preservationists can benefit from stronger alliances in which scholars and practitioners engage in deeper dialogues and exchange. This interdisciplinary collaboration can unite leadership and vision with regard to equity and social justice, with deeper place-based knowledge to improve the social, environmental, and economic health of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Problem, research strategy, and findings:Intense development pressures in fast-growing cities threaten to displace many social and ethnic minority populations and the diverse histories they have created. We assess recent efforts of planners and preservationists in San Francisco to develop programs that use history to encourage greater participation of marginalized populations in the local planning process and protect cultural practices that contribute to the city's diversity. We find that these joint efforts to develop broad cultural preservation programs offer the potential to make planning more inclusive of underserved populations and preserve elements of diverse cultural traditions. However, San Francisco's experience demonstrates the challenges these programs present for planning practice because the historic resources of marginalized populations are often more "intangible" than traditional landmarks. The difficulties encountered include adequately identifying such historic sites, creating new tools to protect them, and the openness of planning and preservation professionals to "softer" interpretations of cultural importance. Takeaway for practice:To preserve a diverse range of cultural activities, planners should help social and cultural minorities identify key community assets. Policies that protect these assets can be complicated by the often intangible nature of cultural practices and may require nonstandard measures that go beyond traditional land use regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses SurveyLA, a citywide historic resources survey conducted by Los Angeles, California and funded by the Getty Foundation under the supervision of the Office of Historic Resources. The surveys, which cover the period of 1850-1980, offer several technological innovations that can be used by other cities to conduct their own historic resources surveys such as the public outreach and participation program. Also discussed is the survey's value on urban and neighborhood planning.

As if trying to seek order among the chaos, urban planning exhibition halls, a unique creation of China’s planning manifesto during the market reform period, have started to appear on the horizon in many cities since the 2000s. This paper examines the production of planning exhibition halls and evaluates their use. It analyses how local governments have used urban planning exhibition halls to perform a set of functions: to prepare the mass audience for its grand future vision, to legitimate government plans for (re)development, to present the edited local history, to promote/glorify the mega events/projects, to spread particular propaganda and to manipulate citizen participation. Further, it finds that while most visitors are satisfied with the information dissemination function, they are disappointed at limited public participation opportunities, poorly presented cultural heritage and inadequately preserved city memory regarding its past plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban History Review / Revue d'Histoire Urbaine is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article shares outcomes from a year-long participatory planning process – one that brought together children and youth engagement, city planning, campus planning, and a university environmental design course to explore child-friendly, dense and affordable housing for a city of approximately 100,000 residents. This process of engagement asked design students to include youth participation and child-friendly cities as an integrated component of sustainable cities. The article shows varying degrees of transformation, views of children as credible participants, and values gained from the project. Many undergraduates changed their thinking about the role of young people in design processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines tensions and frictions in urban planning and spatial practices of town inhabitants since the beginning of the 20th century in the town of Kasba Tadla, an ordinary town in the Middle Atlas Region. It shows how Moroccan towns and cities have been divided into quarters; while some offer all amenities of modern urban life, others, built by the residents themselves, were officially disregarded. From the end of the 20th century onwards, this distinction has been changing towards a more equal distribution of resources. The author suggests a thorough reflection of professional action and proposes that urban planning be rooted in the local context in connection with colonial, national and global influences. Urban development that recognises town people as active partners in the production of urban space is encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At present, sustainable urban development constitutes a major planning goal for many urban environments coping with contemporary challenges and problems confronted by world cities. Towards this end, the concept of smart cities emerges as a promising policy option for effectively dealing with sustainability objectives. In this respect, the focus of the present paper is on the development of an ICT-enabled participatory planning framework for guiding policy-making towards the planning of smart cities. This framework is in alignment with the argument that smart-city solutions must start with the “city” not with the “smart,” shifting from a technology-pushed to an application-pulled smart-city planning approach, matching different types of “smartness” (technologies, tools, and applications) with different types of urban functions and contexts. It is also built upon a digital platform, integrating tools and technologies for data management and e-participatory planning that can support city- and citizen-specific decision making, capable of dealing with objectives for urban sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Municipalities interested in communication, education and social development seek to contribute to citizenship by planning, structuring, storing, and providing access to information. Starting with an overview of the global background to discussions on digital cities and the relation between digital cities and public policies, this article seeks to analyze and describe municipal information planning based on a project carried out, between 2009 and 2014, in the municipality of Vinhedo, São Paulo, Brazil. The study stresses the importance of adopting a project design methodology and implementing projects collectively at a municipal level to increase the efficiency of municipal management and implementing the strategic digital city concept, thereby increasing public space and governability and, consequently, citizens’ quality of life. The results show that municipal information planning projects constitute public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Lien Social et Politiques is the property of Institut National de Recherche Scientifique (INRS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)