1. New Challenges for Participatory Approaches in Spatial Planning

Particularly, the revolutionary movement of ‘68 contributed to spread an anti-authoritarian and anarchical culture, which influenced the public domain as a whole. Faced with a depersonalized society, the movement claimed participation of self-organized social groups in the decision-making process and reassessment of the uniqueness of individuals over a standardized social mass.

About Rawlsian Theory of Social Justice an in-depth analysis is provided in Chap. 2.

In a more recent work (Lindblom 1990), the author explains the mechanism of partisan mutual adjustment, according to which each actor probes their own way of defining the problem considered through interaction, as well as the possible actions to cope with it and the acceptable solutions. Partisan mutual adjustment happens through probing (Lindblom 1990).

Cohen, March and Olses called “organized anarchies” these kinds of organizations.

In the article Coping with Uncertainty in Planning (1985), Christensen provides an interpretation of planning strategies as attempts to organize and relate means and ends, essentially reasserting the double character of the discipline. As Christensen states in her article, planning in conditions of confusion about both means and ends (ambiguity and uncertainty) is about finding a relation among them in the course of action, while thinking about the problem situation. The most effective strategy corresponds to redefining the problem (problem-setting) it elicits order and meanings from ambiguity (Christensen 1985) using expert and experiential knowledge in a collective process of making sense together (Christensen 1985).

For Friedmann, Social Learning’s pragmatism represents the practical way of overcoming political ambiguity and conservative approach of Policy Analysis, in particular of Lindblom’s incrementalism (Friedmann 1987).

Among the others agencies working on advocacy planning in United States, UPA (Urban Planning Aid) was one of the must active. As an O.N.G., UPA was working in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lead by Lisa Peattie, Chester Hartman and Robert Goodman. Their activities switched from advocacy to empowerment practices after few years. In fact, the Lisa Peattie’s radical conception of social planning pointed out the need for working with local communities by empowering them, rather than considering them as the planner’s client (Peattie 1968).

German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas developed his “Theory of communicative action” (1984 and 1987, orig. 1981) which forms the cornerstone of communicative planning theory. He analyses public discourse and language as a non-neutral instrument in public action: “language is a tool for social control and power domination. It is necessary to legitimize power relations (…) and can be ideological”. In order to escape the distortion of the public discourse, Habermas suggests a theory of communicative action aimed at clearing the language from any ideological or instrumental super-structures. Thus, he argues that anyone who engages in a rational argumentation implicitly assumes some universal demand of effectiveness: (1) fairness (Richtigkeit): each speaker has to respect rules of the argumentative situation: for example, to listen to other’s assumption or to withdraw their own, whenever these prove false; (2) truth (Wahreit): each speaker has to formulate their own existential statement; (3) truthfulness (Wahrhaftigkeit). Each speaker has to be honest and convinced of their own statements, (4) comprehensibleness (Verständlichkeit): each speaker has to talk in a convenient way, consistent with grammatical meanings and rules. If one of these pre-conditions is not satisfied, then any possibility to create shared understanding crumbles (Abbagnano and Forniero 1996).

According to a deliberative model for democracy, public discourse is interpreted as a collective deliberation, a dialogical process during which participants’ preferences can emerge and evolve, through interaction and confrontation. More insights in deliberative democracy will be provided in the following chapters.

Forester builds a theory of deliberation contrasting with the practice of negotiation. According to communicative rationality, deliberating and negotiating mean rationally discussing and defending individual interests respectively. The former persuades though pure argumentative tools, while the latter is based on promises and intimidations (Elster 1991).

Reference is here made to contemporary versions of Arnstein’s “Stair of Participation” (1969), which for the first time tried to evaluate and classify participation and inclusiveness in planning decision-making processes at different levels. While Arnstein’s levels of participation were conceived as a political aim of participatory planning in terms of enhancing social mobilization, contemporary classifications and taxonomy of methods (which associated different techniques of public facilitation with different kinds of participation in the public domain) are mainly value-free and conceived as interrelated steps of a progressive participatory process. Specifically, while Arnstein considered empowerment and citizens’ power as the only real participation, for contemporary classifications animation, communication and consultation (Mela and Ciaffi 2006), collaboration or active involvement (Ecosfera 2001) are key steps towards empowerment.

Pretty suggested a “typology of participation” (Pretty 1995) to distinguish between more and less participatory interventions. He described seven distinct forms of participation: (1) manipulative participation, (2) passive participation, (3) participation by consultation, (4) participation for material incentives, (5) functional participation, (6) interactive participation, and (7) self-mobilization. The first ones are the least participatory, especially manipulative intervention, where participation is only confined to physical presence. On the other end, self-mobilization implies total participation, where all aspects of the intervention are carried out bottom-up.

Bobbio (2004), a well-known handbook providing local administrators with guidelines to activate participatory decision-making processes, classifies participatory tools and methodologies according to three main “approaches” to participation: (1) Active listening: an approach that includes all those techniques addressed to understand how problems are described and perceived by participants; (2) Constructive interaction: that gathers all the methods for helping people discuss and produce shared decisions; (3) Conflicts resolution: that instead collects those techniques aimed at containing and reducing radical conflicts (Bobbio 2004).

A deeper insight of this statement is given by the author in the article “Planning Theory and The City” (2005). “The ideal that everyone’s opinion should be respectfully heard and that no particular group should be privileged in an interchange is an important normative argument. But it is not a sufficient one, and it does not deal adequately with the classic conundrums of democracy. These include the problems of insuring adequate representation of all interests in a large, socially divided group; of protecting against demagoguery; of achieving more than token public participation; of preventing economically or institutionally powerful interests from defining the agenda; and of maintaining minority rights. Within political theory, endless dispute has revolved around these issues, and they have by no means been resolved. Communicative planning theory typically tends to pass over them in its reliance on goodwill and to dismiss the view that the character of the obstacles to consensus building based on tolerance derive from a social context that must be analyzed” (Fainstein 2005).

By quoting Susan Fainstein “(..) the advocates of a Habermasian or deliberative approach argue that the role of planners is to listen, especially to listen to subordinated groups. Acting as a mediator, the planner must search for consensus and in doing so accept a plurality of ways of knowing, of self-expression (stories, art, etc.), and of truth (Forester 1999; Healey 1997; Innes 1995; Hoch 2007). Criticism of this outlook is not anti-democratic, but rather contends that it is a proceduralist approach which fails to take into account the reality of structural inequality and hierarchies of power (Fainstein 2009).

See A più Voci, Bobbio (2004) and www.​communityplannin​g.​net.