Planning consultants are increasingly hired to organize citizen participation processes for urban development projects. However, the ways in which planning consultants engage in and perceive the involvement of citizens in urban development projects remain relatively understudied. This article opens the black box of consultancy employees' perceptions toward citizens in urban development processes. Employees from two consultancy firms in the Netherlands were interviewed, and several focus groups were organized. This research shows that consultants have wide-ranging views concerning the ways of incorporating citizens' interests in urban development projects. With the use of Q-methodology, a typology of how consultants engage with citizens is proposed. Furthermore, we show that the different perceptions of consultants lead to a different approach in identifying the needs and problems of citizens. This finding gives insight into the context in which decisions about urban development are made.
The use of contracts to achieve public goals has been gaining traction since the 1980s. In this article, I investigate the implications of the increased use of private law instruments for participatory democracy. This study starts with problematising the notion of contracts and proposes a conceptual model to study contractual relations in participatory processes. Next, through a detailed description of two case studies in Amsterdam and Hamburg, I show the consequences of contractual governance for participatory democracy in urban development. Namely, the interests of commercial parties and government agencies are incorporated in contracts, whereas the interests of residents are incorporated in non-legal agreements. This has four implications for our understanding of participatory democracy and urban politics. First, the arena of public decision making has shifted from public meetings to contractual negotiations. Second, contracts are not set in stone. Mobilisation by residents can influence, adjust and politicise agreements. However, third, residents need to be able to mobilise and negotiate. This creates new boundaries between residents who are able to make deals and those who are excluded. Lastly, investigating how contracts transform urban politics should take a broad view on how contractual relations are formed and focus on both non-legal and contractual agreements.
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