Building “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Sherry Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” is the cornerstone for planners thinking about citizen participation. Arnstein wrote the article based on her experiences working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from 1967 to 1968 as the chief advisor on citizen participation in the Model Cities Program. Despite the article’s substantial influence on the planning field, very little has been published about Arnstein herself and the contributing factors that influenced her writing. In this article, I draw on life history and archival research to place “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” and its author in their historical context, offering new insights into the politics behind the emphasis on citizen involvement in the Model Cities Program and Arnstein’s call to action for a new “partnership” interpretation of citizen participation. I conclude with Arnstein’s broader partnership model as a new point of departure for the emerging dialogue about the equalizing relationship between local government and community groups among the next generation of planners and scholars.

Takeaway for practice: there are two takeaways that practicing planners can learn from following Arnstein’s journey in building “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”. First, Arnstein’s career is a blueprint that shows how community advocacy planners can be pragmatic instigators for change. Her professional working model in establishing shared understandings while working within institutional constraints is an important strategy Arnstein used to tackle nationwide injustices ranging from juvenile delinquency, to segregation of hospitals, to inequitable citizen participation practices. Second, Arnstein only discusses half of her HUD citizen participation work in “A Ladder”. The other half of her citizen participation work looked at local governments taking the lead for creating equitable citizen participation processes through the building of long-term “partnerships” with local community groups.