Making urban design a public participatory goal: toward evidence-based urbanism

Abstract

The paper builds upon the evidence of an increasing consensus toward citizens'engagement practices in shaping both the form and functioning of the city; and upon the apparent distance between the setting up of governance structures adequate for participatory processes to be performed, and the daily urban planning and design. Against this context, the research investigates whether public participation processes are adequately and appropriately addressed in urban planning and design practices. A bibliometric analysis on participatory processes' connection with urban studies (including urban governance, planning, design and development) is described, together with an in-deep evaluation of some works which makes it possible to appreciate the complexity of the topic. The bibliometric analysis reveals a significant divide between the traditional fields of social sciences, built environment disciplines and information technologies; and no common understanding or framework to translate aspirations for greater citizen participation into improved planning, design and construction of city infrastructures. Discussion and conclusions provide, thus, some guidelines for an ambitious research agenda to address these shortcomings based on a systems approach, able to integrate the processes and results from direct participatory processes into decision making for urban planning and design. Keywords: participatory processes, bibliometric analysis, urban governance, urban planning, urban design 1. The need for cross fertilisation between urban studies and participatory processes It is nowaday clear in socio-spatial research that those who have the means and the legitimacy to produce the physical space inhabited both in terms of planning, design and development practices, are equally-still more subtly-endowed with the power to foster democracy, equality and participation or, conversely, to produce exclusive spaces where injustice and unequality are perpetuated (Harvey 1990; Soja 2000). The power to shape the form and functioning of the city has been for a long time almost exclusively hold by urban design professionals, exerting it under the guide of public administrations and in strict alliance with building companies. Nowadays the vastly documented complexification of the urban governance sphere (Sassen 2006), in response to a crisis of confidence in the ability of national states to create socially cohesive and green-oriented cities inhabited by public-spirited citizens (Coaffee and Healey, 2003; Garcia 2006; Jones and Evans 2006 and de Wilde et al 2015), required an increased attention toward truly participatory practices granting access for citizens to urban-related decision making processes. Cities confront today a host of challenges and opportunities, as witnessed by policy and state of the art reports emerging from regional and international governmental agencies during the last decade (UNICEF 2004, IEA 2008, EC 2011, EC 2011a, OECD 2016). The unparalleled attention being paid to cities is due to urban centers being at the nexu...

Smart and Regenerative Urban Growth: A Literature Network Analysis

“…The last step of the literature network analysis is to detect the most influential authors and see how they are related to each other.VOS mapping and clustering techniques are both promising and useful. They have been applied to conduct bibliometric analysis in various fields of studies for instance co-occurrence term analysis in psychology [15], bibliographic analysis of the concept safety culture [16] of the Journal of Infection and Public Health [17], of thermal comfort and building control research [18] and a bibliometric analysis on connection between urban governance, planning, design and development [19] among others. Thus, we adopted the software and adapted the network analysis algorithms to decode the degree of connectivity between smart and regenerative urban growth concepts.The remainder of this study is organized as follows.…”

STEAM without hot air: strategy for educating creative engineers

“…This is illustrated by the growing interest in participatory urban design for infrastructure projects from highway projects to city regeneration schemes that incorporates the voices of all stakeholders into decision-making processes (Forester 1999;Healey 1997;Reardon 1999). Yet a bibliometric analysis of academic literature carried out by Dyer, Certoma and Corsini (2017) of over 14,883 scientific articles identified only 127 single country case studies that assessed the effectiveness of direct participatory democracy in practice. There is clearly a need for more case studies and postoccupancy assessment of public participation into infrastructure projects and the associated societal as well as becoming benefits (O'Shea et al 2016).…”

Urban Narrative: Computational Linguistic Interpretation of Large Format Public Participation for Urban Infrastructure

“…This requires urban practitioners to listen to both what people need and critically understand why based on underlying value systems. In the past, it has been difficult to capture this information at a large scale simply due to the practicality of liaising with large groups without losing contextual information about people's needs and aspirations (Certomà, Dyer, Pocatilu, & Rizzi, 2017;Dyer, Corsini, & Certomà, 2017).…”