Communicative and participatory paradigm in the European territorial policies. A discourse analysis

ABSTRACT

Communicative planning has been widely criticized for having little to do with the official legal procedures and for low-quality spatial solutions. It has also been blamed to be an empty concept, referring to an action that in itself has no content. This critique gives ground to the question: what is actually the role of the communicative and participatory paradigm in contemporary territorial policies? In this paper, we adopt discourse analysis methods to study the European documents on spatial planning in their three characteristic strands: smart city, integrated planning and multilevel governance. By extracting eight core principles (governance, sustainability, communication, participation, resilience, innovation, cooperation and coordination), we measure the importance of the communicative and participatory paradigm in the current planning discourse in Europe. We find that despite critique it remains one of the fundamental building-blocks of the European territorial policy. Communicative planning principles are visibly present in all the analysed strands of spatial planning in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Communicative planning
• participatory planning
• EU territorial policy
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The whole corpus is available at: https://clarin-pl.eu/dspace/handle/11321/316.

2 The former are: Sustainable Urban Mobility (alternative energies, public transport, efficient logistics, planning); Sustainable Districts and Built Environment (improving the energy efficiency of buildings and districts, increasing the share of renewable energy sources used and the liveability of our communities) and Integrated Infrastructures and processes across Energy, ICT and Transport (connecting infrastructure assets to improve the efficiency and sustainability of cities). The latter are: Citizen focus, Policy and Regulation, Integrated planning and management, Knowledge Sharing, Baselines, Performance Indicators and Metrics, Open data governance, Standards, Business Models, Procurement and Funding (European Commission, 2013).

3 For example the word ‘government’ as a synonym for ‘governance’ has been excluded from the set of textual word forms related to ‘governance’ as in the planning debate it refers to top-down public decision-making, opposed to ‘bottom-up’ approach represented by ‘governance’. The term ‘efficiency’ does not appear in dictionary definitions of ‘sustainability’ but has been included to the set of textual word forms related to ‘sustainability’ due to its conceptual links with sustainability in the planning discourse. The word ‘administration’ as a synonym for ‘governance’ may be misleading due to its ambiguity and therefore has been removed. The word ‘contactability’ has not been included in the table as its meaning is too distant from the essence of public communication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was co-financed as part of the investment in the CLARIN-PL research infrastructure funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education Republic of Poland.