Participatory Design Theory

Using Technology and Social Media to Foster Civic Engagement

Oswald Devisch, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Roel De Ridder, Oswald Devisch, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Roel De Ridder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138087682
• eBook ISBN: 9781351615747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In recent years, many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organization.

This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments? Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland.

Part I
To diversify

1
Valuating narrative accounts in participatory planning processes

A case of co-creative storytelling in Antwerp, Belgium

Tim Devos, Seppe De Blust and Maarten Desmet

Introduction

All the more in the theoretical debate as well as in planning practice we see a plea for an increased citizen involvement in planning processes (Albrechts, 2002, 2008; Van Herzele, 2004). Civic engagement in planning practice is seen as a powerful formula to head towards a “deeper concept of democratic values”: bringing politics closer to the people and transforming planning approaches and institutions in such a way that it will lead to the creation of more sustainable and qualitative urban spaces as well as to an enhanced quality of urban political life (Booher, 2008, p. 383). An introduction of “creativity from below” or the “wisdom of crowds” is seen as a vital key to begin to understand the full complexity of stakeholders, opinions and intertwined webs of relations relevant to spatial planning (Albrechts, 2008, p. 412).

A shift towards participatory approaches in planning has to be accompanied by the recognition that the planners who organize deliberative processes and set the agendas consequently possess the power to include and exclude different publics, opinions and values (Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, 2007). As Hillier argues it is precisely in the way values are “defined, concealed or confused” that power is most often exercised in planning. Introducing these increasingly ‘fashionable’ participatory processes doesn’t necessarily imply the actual planning to be effectively inclusive. Often certain groups are still marginalized or disempowered within the process. In participatory planning literature this issue has been widely discussed: different authors have stressed the need to take power relationships into account (Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, 2007) and the difficulties faced in creating a situation in which different social groups have equal access to take part in participatory debate (Innes and Booher, 2004). Some claim the need to create a communicative space or arena that allows for the vast plurality of voices to be heard and taken into account. However, establishing this arena of interaction is an extremely difficult issue since a neutral, apolitical space of communication is essentially an impossible construct, for all interaction is textured by a complex “myriad of power relations” (Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, 2007, p. 451).

In this regard this chapter argues that the valuation of narrative modes of thought and communication can be crucial within participatory planning processes to capture the full complexity of an urban location and benefit from the richness of plurality. Facilitating the co-construction of meaningful real-life stories that relate to actual experiences and living conditions, while directly confronting these with existing power relations and planning instruments provides a meaningful approach to bridge the gap between local knowledge and the discourse of spatial planners and designers.

This paper will first theoretically explore the narrative mode of reasoning and its potential as a meaningful tool for participatory approaches to planning. This is followed by a case study exploring how certain core-storylines were co-constructed throughout a participatory planning process in Antwerp Belgium. By describing these core-storylines the case study seeks to explore the different ways they provided a means to stimulate an inclusive process, aiming to influence the development of a masterplan for a redevelopment project.

Storytelling and the narrative mode of reasoning

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book Nausea, writes

[A] man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

(Sartre, 1964, p. 56)

Jerome Bruner describes how we interpret the world around us in two fundamentally different ways: using either the paradigmatic mode or the narrative mode of reasoning, argument or story. Whereas the paradigmatic or scientific mode is concerned with categorization and conceptualization, the narrative mode is concerned with attaching meaning to our daily experiences through the construction of stories. Although these two modes are complementary they are not reducible to one another and cannot be evaluated based on the same criteria (Bruner, 1987). Moreover the continuous construction of stories or “world-making”, can even be considered as the “principal function of mind”; a means to structure our real-life experiences, organize our memory and attach meaning to events and observations in a continuous narrative effort (Bruner, 2004, p. 691). Therefore man is “essentially a story telling animal” engaging in “enacted narratives” and framing both our own and other peoples actions in a narrative (MacIntyre, 2007). Constructing these stories or recounting relevant episodes in our lives is essentially a narrative achievement, never an undiluted, direct reflection of what really happened (Bruner 2004, 693). A story is therefore always a particular interpretation, reinterpretation or structuring of experience itself; one of the infinite number of hypotheses, versions and expected scenarios and never a neutral, innocent account.

Stories and the conception of narratives are not only the principal way in which we shape and structure our experiences but also the way in which we communicate them to others. Therefore we can distinguish between the interpretive and interpersonal motives that shape stories: stories are deployed to make sense of our own experience but can also be aimed at achieving an effect on other people (Baumeister and Newman, 1994). Stories thus often express more than a mere stitching together of events: they are constructed around a certain problem and the very “point” of the story is an elaboration of how this problem is to be resolved according to the narrator, thus containing a strongly formulated vision or persuasive statement (Ryfe, 2006, p. 74). In other words the construction of stories is a narrative attempt to control or shape the past as well as the future; “a pattern of a desired world” (Mandelbaum, 1991, p. 210). The way in which we communicate this personal, genuine vision of what ought to have happened or should happen in the future, actively invites others to share this vision, to inhabit our stories. This is exactly where the relevance of stories in a deliberative context comes into play: by explaining how things ‘really are’ from our perspective we explicitly encourage others to share their personal view, their take on the story. We provoke them to agree or disagree, we invite others to “deliberate on this authentic account of what is” (Vandenabeele et al., 2011, p. 183). In dealing with competing stories, humans have the capacity to evaluate the legitimacy of a story by using what Fisher has described as “narrative rationality” (Fisher, 1989). In this way it makes us capable of dealing with the continuous flow of competing and often contradicting stories. People in being natural storytellers have the capacity to evaluate the coherence and fidelity of stories.

Valuating the narrative mode to capture complexity in planning

The planning context in practice as well as in academic circles often expresses a clear preference towards a rational form of argumentation, expecting “neat singular constructions” (Van Herzele, 2004, p. 200). Arguably, the complex web of pluralistic statements as it can be expressed through stories is therefore often decomposed into elements that can be analysed, calibrated and mapped, providing a sort of “relief” from the complexities of a holistic world which often seems beyond our control (Mandelbaum, 1991, p. 210). This makes for an argumentative space in which the narrative form is not valued to the fullest or even systematically ignored unless logical arguments are abstracted from it (Mandelbaum, 1991). Rational values try to impose a sort of “artificial order” on the uncontrollable flow of values and opinions planners have to deal with in order to be able to manage competing opinions (Hillier, 1999, p. 179). As a consequence, participatory planning processes often fail to fully value genuine accounts starting from the social specificity or the practical day to day usage of a particular site or neighbourhood.

It is only through valuating and listening to the myriad of competing stories that we can grasp the complexity and nuance, which is often impossible to capture by abstract propositions and other rationalizing tools prevailing in formal debate (Vandenabeele et al., 2011, 183). While abstract conclusions remove ambiguities, narrow the interpretative field, the narrative mode helps us to think about situations that involve conflict without ignoring contradictions (Baumeister and Newman, 1994). Storytelling has the power to make progress between conflicting parties, to get past “my needs versus yours” by “taking a step to the side to allow three steps forward”; personal accounts can open up unexpected connections between these parties by considering issues from a new angle (Forester, 2000). The narrative mode of thought can provide us with what Latour (Latour, 2009, p. 102) calls “the power to take into account”: encouraging and appreciating narrative accounts can both promote plurality and overcome thresholds that non-professionals face when engaging in deliberation on complex spatial issues (Ryfe, 2006).

Van Hulst (2012) identifies two strands in which storytelling is approached in planning research: firstly as a model ‘of’ the way planning is done and secondly as a model ‘for’ the way planning could be done. The first strand emphasizes that planning itself can be likened to storytelling: “we can think of planning as an enacted and future oriented narrative in which the participants are both characters and joint-authors” (Throgmorton, 1996, p. 47). Planners are storytellers, authors of persuasive and future-oriented texts that reflect opposing views and that can be read in diverse and conflicting ways (Throgmorton, 1996). The second strand argues that storytelling is an important model ‘for’ the way planning can be practiced. Focusing on how the craft of storytelling can improve practice to be more inclusive if storytelling is valued and cultivated within the planning process. As Van Hulst (2012) briefly touches upon storytelling, ‘for’ is however not merely about reconstruction stories, or investigating a community or neighbourhoods narrative, but rather about how co-constructing stories is a way to develop an inclusive process and stimulate neighbourhood engagement.

Despite the apparent value of narratives within a participatory planning setting, there are however still few practitioners or academics who creatively or consciously shape processes where the ability to tell stories is nurtured or a space is created for stories to be heard (Sandercock, 2003). In addition, despite the increasing belief that it is important for everybody to have their stories heard, it remains often unclear how collective stories will be put to use or incorporated in the actual planning process (Sandercock, 2010). The importance of story has rarely been understood, nor validated (Sandercock, 2003). The following case study description therefore explicitly focuses on developing an outline of an approach to operationalize co-productive storytelling within a participatory planning process that seeks confrontation with existing power relations and formalized planning instruments.

A participatory planning trajectory in Antwerp, Dam

In 2012 the city of Antwerp announced the ambition to develop a masterplan to redevelop the site of the former municipal slaughterhouse, into a qualitative neighbourhood with housing as its main function. Following this ambitious note a cooperation agreement was signed between three private owners and the city to facilitate the redevelopment of the site in a public–private partnership. The redevelopment of this site, including apart from the slaughterhouse the quays of a nearby dock and a neighbourhood park, would roughly double the small neighbourhood Dam, in which it is located, in size and population. This triggered a recently established neighbourhood association (Damcomité) to start up a petition, demanding that the city be involved in the planning process from the very beginning. The committee appealed to ndvr, a young office for social spatial research and (participatory) process guidance co-founded by the authors, to assist them in developing an inclusive participatory process in relation to the masterplanning process. This marked the start of an on-going intensive process of action research. Ndvr executed this work pro bono and as a part of the authors’ doctoral research. Postgraduate students of the Master of Human Settlements and the Master of Urbanism and Strategic Planning at KU Leuven assisted ndvr in this research, taking part in a first semester studio (2013 and 2014) on Strategic Spatial Planning, taught by the authors.

In this research ndvr assumed an independent role, however working in close cooperation with the city administration on the one hand and neighbourhood organizations on the other. Throughout this process the participative construction of storylines was put to use as a collaborative approach to bridge the gap between the opposing discourses of future oriented development plans and local needs. Rather than on a delineated set of methods, this approach was based on three iterative and interrelated steps: identifying community-narratives, co-constructing storylines and strategic implementations. In the following pages this approach is described by combining each of these three steps with the storylines that proved to be most central throughout the process.

Identifying community-narratives

At the start of the process there was a clear choice to take up an investigative, exploratory role and thoroughly study the neighbourhood in order to ‘get a grip’ on actual conditions. This was done in order to identify the possible added value of the project and search for locally embedded preconditions in reaction to the common concern that no local input, needs and opportunities would feed the designs. First, dominant community-narratives concerning the neighbourhood were identified, based on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I To diversify
• PART II To co-produce
• PART III To interrupt
• PART IV To document
• Index