ABSTRACT
Citizen participation in public decision-making generally and urban planning in particular is characterised by two paradoxes. The first paradox is that, while citizen participation today is decreasing compared to the explosion of citizens’ movements, self-reliance projects and local associations in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers and public debaters repeatedly contend that there is an increased need for such participation (Burby, 2003). The other paradox is that while public planners welcome increased citizen participation they are not willing to accept the long-term implications. In fact, planners do not seem to be aware of the real purpose of participation (Campbell, 2002). As a result, even when public planners are actively committed to promoting new participatory planning processes they tend to ignore the existing informal participative practices. The paradox here is in promoting a competition between invited and invented spaces of participation (Miraftab and Willis, 2005; Cornwall, 2002). Participation, democratic decision-making, equality and consensus-making
are four recurring themes in discussions today in philosophy and social sciences (Hendler, 1995). All these four themes point towards the increased importance of citizen participation in public decision-making and of the importance of developing forms of participation other than those occurring within the context of representative democracy (Premfors and Roth, 2004). Against the backdrop of the paradoxes and the current debate on new
forms of citizen participation, this chapter discusses the traditional approach to evaluating public participation, and participation according to new theoretical considerations including deliberative democracy, empowerment and transformative potential. The chapter is illustrated by two case studies, one from a traditional evaluation of public participation in Sweden and the
other one using a case study from Bari showing the challenges in evaluating participation according to new perspectives. The chapter is organised in six sections including this brief introduction.
