Methods of engagement: On civic participation formats as composition devices in urban planning

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates and develops the contribution of pragmatic sociology to the study of urban life and politics, by way of analysing recent shifts in the cultural-political forms of civic participation in formal urban planning. In doing so, it seeks to stage a critical test of the diagnosis of a ‘certified’, (neo-)liberal city that has recently emerged from work with Laurent Thévenot’s sociology of engagements and commonalities. Drawing on extensive empirical materials on the methods and formats of civic participation in contemporary Danish urban planning, we identify three dominant civic participation formats: the hearing, the dialogue meeting, and the workshop. These formats, we argue, work as composition devices that stabilise certain figures of the urban (quasi-)’citizen’, endowed with circumscribed possibilities for political engagement. Rather than a monolithic process of ‘certification’, we conclude, recent years have witnessed a partial and contested translation of the urban citizen into more manageable, liberal shapes.

KEYWORDS:

• Pragmatic sociology
• engagements
• urban planning
• civic participation
• composition devices

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eeva Luhtakallio, Laurent Thévenot and other fellow participants at the special issue colloquium in Helsinki, 1–2 September 2016, for valuable comments on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Some studies also compare different processes or sites of participation, for example in different countries (Pløger, 2001) and over different periods of time (Lane, 2005).

2 We borrow the notion of ‘proportionality’, and its attendant mapping analogy, from Venturini (2012).

3 More specifically, the documents analysed in this study were collected as part of an unpublished master's thesis research project, conducted by one of the authors.

4 In a few cases, where specified documents were not available online, these have been acquired via offline contact with the organisations in question.

5 In Denmark, the national Danish Planning Act of 1970 made such hearings mandatory, thus formalising a participatory aspect of urban planning (Sehested, 2009, p. 247).

6 As should be evident, Pløger (2004) himself is highly critical of such ‘Habermasian’ ideals, preferring to invoke a more ‘Foucauldian’ imaginary of ’strife’ as basic to urban politics.

7 All translations from Danish are by the authors.

8 As such, these settings also make use of what Thévenot, following the work of Nicolas Aurey, has dubbed the regime of explorative engagement. For lack of space, and because such engagements remain largely invisible in our documentary material, we do not pursue this point further.

9 Innovation is here not conceived in the inspirational sense, whereby people receive inspiration directly – and in solitude – from a higher source; it rather relates to the project regime, in which innovation and creativity occur in the (network) connection between people.

10 In a different context (Blok & Meilvang, 2015), we have argued for the key role of photographs and other forms of visuality in allowing urban activists the possibility of expressing their familiar attachments to specific urban sites.

11 Indeed, tensions of this practical nature, tied to planning participation as an uncertain situation, may be said to underlie the widely divergent academic critiques and justifications previously hinted at.