Citizens' Anti-highway Revolt in Post-Pinochet Chile: Catalyzing Innovation in Transport Planning

Abstract

During the last third of the 20th century, citizens throughout North America and Europe organized protests against urban highway projects, influencing urban transport planning in ways that shape its evolution to this day. With the globalization of car-centred urban planning models, some similar movements have emerged in developing countries. What, if anything, can they tell us about citizens' role in innovation to achieve more socially just, good and livable cities? Using a multidisciplinary approach grounded in planning theory and a local adaptation of participatory action research methods, this study explores lessons from an anti-highway movement in Santiago, Chile (1997). This study contributes citizens' perspective on crucial issues within the philosophy and history of city planning, examining shifts in governance that can significantly influence the potential for change in planning and city systems, even under adverse conditions. Is improving participation just a matter of ‘getting the process right’? This experience indicates that it requires re-formulating frameworks to encompass democratization, fostering multi-scalar, self-generating civil society organizations, and focusing on the role of organized citizens, rather than individuals, as they act on policy ecologies. The evidence from this Santiago case supports Portugali's argument that planning is both a profession, exercised by especially trained ‘experts’, and a skill exercised by citizens working from their everyday expertise. This example explores the mechanisms through which, even in a relatively hostile environment, self-generated citizen organizations may play a significant role in contesting business-as-usual debates and achieving innovative policies favouring greater equality and sustainability.

Keywords::

• citizen participation
• democratization
• transport
• cycling
• planning
• innovation

Introduction: Highway Revolts, Participation and Planning in an Authoritarian Context

Twentieth-century ‘revolts’ against highways changed planning in many cities in North America and Europe. Their impact went beyond specific projects to influence governance, as occurred in Portland where an anti-highway campaign led to democratization of local government (Cotugno, 2010), and transport policy, as occurred in the Netherlands where cycling became integral to planning (Godefrooij, 2007; Godefrooij et al., 2009). In New York (Flint, 2009), Toronto (Sewell, 1972) and Vancouver (Harcourt et al., 2007), public transport remained significant, despite the prevailing car-centric focus throughout North America.

The study of these early events, along with other neighbourhood movements in North America and Europe, led Susskind and Elliott (1983) to categorize forms of citizen—government interaction as falling into patterns of ‘paternalism, conflict, and co-production’, where paternalism involves top-down, government-controlled processes and conflict bottom-up citizen efforts to defeat projects they consider wrongheaded. Co-production refers to more collaborative approaches that distribute power, resources and responsibility more evenly among government and citizen leaders. These categories were developed for countries with flourishing democracies, however, with a relatively robust and diverse ecology of citizen groups.

Less is known about how these debates emerge in developing countries, and the role they may play in fostering citizens' ability to influence both planning and innovation. How well do lessons based on cases in more democratic contexts apply to countries emerging from brutal, authoritarian experiences? Above all, where do democratic citizens come from in post-dictatorial cultures, and how do we get democratic cultures and rules without citizens schooled in democracy?

In Chile's case, the military dictatorship (1973–1990) destroyed one of Latin America's more democratic political cultures, re-founding crucial institutions—education, health care, universities and the economy—using torture, disappearance, exile and terror to erase the political capacity and collective memory developed by 20th century social movements. When the regime ended almost 20 years later, where were ‘citizenship’ skills, understood as people's collective ability to challenge power and influence decisions, supposed to come from?

This study examines a citizen movement against the Costanera Norte highway concession (1997–2000), which challenged authoritarian planning paradigms and significantly influenced urban governance. In 2000, leaders founded Living City (Ciudad Viva), which today has become a prize-winning, citizen-led planning institution.

These experiences provide insight into key factors that can combine to build civic capacity in hostile contexts, complementing existing debates regarding participation, citizenship and development. Moreover, they reveal the important role of urban planning conflicts, given the territorial, cultural and other factors that come into play. Finally, they indicate that conflicts over major transport projects may offer fertile ground for the emergence of effective citizens, since they cut across physical, scalar, class and other boundaries, making possible the kind of diversity, interdependence and authentic dialogue (Innes & Booher, 2010) considered key to successful collaborative planning.

This study also contributes a citizens' perspective on crucial issues within the philosophy and history of city planning, examining shifts in governance that can significantly change planning and city systems, even under adverse conditions.

Issues of power and the role of organized citizens collectively striving to change specific policies emerge in discussions of social movements associated with ‘insurgent’ citizens (Sandercock, 1998; Friedmann, 2002; Holston, 2008), but are often excluded from more specific discussions of participation, which tend to proceed as if only individuals, and not their organizations, matter (IAP2, 2011). This gap becomes particularly problematic in democratizing countries, most of which have not generated the robust civil society ecologies taken for granted in the more advanced democracies (Europe, North America, Oceania) that emerged after World War II (Dahl, 1998; Avritzer, 2002; Tilly, 2007). This is not to say they do not have impressive civil society movements and organizations, but these are skilled in tactics appropriate to fighting dictatorship—burning tires and hurling molotov cocktails to prevent police invasions of unarmed citizens in their homes, for example, rather than the thrust and parry of lobbying, legal, political, mass protest and media tactics available in democracy.

In post-Pinochet Chile, these debates were largely framed by ‘participation’ in its most limited, paternalistic, sense: should citizens have a say, if so, how could it be controlled? Key planning concepts have long attempted to move beyond this view, emphasizing empowerment (Friedmann, 1992), deliberation (Forester, 1999; Gastil, 2008), collective learning (Argyris & Schön, 1974) and collaboration (Healey, 1997). Improving actual ‘participation’ has nonetheless proven extremely difficult in both planning (Forester, 2000; Healey, 2000; Yiftachel & Huxley, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Yiftachel, 2006, 2009) and development (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004).

One reason may be the focus mainly on participation by individuals coming together in temporary processes with specific goals. This study examines these issues in the context of local conflicts, arguing that they offer insight into the role of identity and other collective aspects of citizenship. It reveals the importance of examining not only large social movements, but small citizen groups, important to building the ‘civic capacity’ necessary for effective, autonomous political action.

This Santiago case examines participation from the perspective of collectively exercised citizenship, as communities organize themselves, rather than waiting for policymakers to listen or act on their behalf. It supports arguments that improving participation is more than a matter of ‘getting the process right’ and shifts the focus to a more integral framework that considers individual and collective skills as they relate to democratization, particularly governance and institutions. This case also illustrates the powerful role that citizen groups can play in driving whole systems toward more innovation, in favour of justice and sustainability.

Methods: Participatory Action Research to Contribute A Citizens' Perspective on Planning

This study began by reviewing concepts from political science (democratization), sociology (social movements), adult education (citizen learning) and other fields, along with key thinking in planning, summarized earlier. I participated in many of these events, first as an ordinary neighbour, and later as a member of a committee, then elected leader of a neighbourhood association, representative to the anti-highway coalition and a founder of Living City. Consistent with this history, I used a participatory action research approach with Living City as co-researcher.

My own studies, including the Ph.D. for which this research took place, reflected a decision by Living City leaders to pursue higher education, so that citizens would have ‘technical expertise’ on ‘our side’. Formal qualifications are important in a context shaped by ‘technical’, ‘scientific’ and engineering views of society, and biased against social sciences1 and ordinary people.

The research process involved a strong ethnographic component, as we synthesized experiences as ‘observing participants’, that is participants who reflect and observe, rather than the traditional positionality of the participant observer, an outsider who gets involved in the organization under study. This also reversed traditional roles associated with studies by scholars in academic or planning locations, who are insiders in the planning system, and outsiders, when they examine civil society. In this study, we examined the planning system as outsiders, located in civil society.

This required different tools and sensitivity to both the potential of this positionality (greater detail and insight) and the limitations (too close to evaluate with some degree of objectivity). To establish the quality, we relied on several rigorous external evaluations (Valle, 2003; Sepúlveda, 2005; Kroeger Claussen, 2009) and academic studies (Ducci, 2002; Allard, 2003; Ivan Poduje, 2008; Tironi et al., 2010b). The views of Living City's past and present leaders (33 people) were collected through reflective workshops (2010–2011), and their reflections triangulated using 38 semi-structured interviews, with key actors in local, regional, national citizen, government and private spheres.

In many ways, this was a search for both individual and collective meanings behind life-changing experiences. In no way do we claim this to be ‘the’ citizens' view of planning. Rather, we see this as a way to systematize lessons from our experiments in the living laboratory of the city, in a way that can contribute ‘a’ citizen's perspective on issues of interest to planners and citizens alike.

As recommended when researching one's own organization, two reflective narratives (on the Coordinadora and Living City) formed the basis of this study. As Stacey and Griffin observe, this research ‘is an interpretation, a subjective reflection on personal experience’. But that does not make it an ‘arbitrary account’: it should make sense to others and seek to participate in a wider tradition of thought (Stacey & Griffin, 2005).

The Anti-Highway Revolt (1997–2001), Forging Autonomous Citizen Approaches

In Chile, the military regime (1973–1990), headed by General Augusto Pinochet, interrupted a period of sweeping social movements and significant changes in power relations to install a neoliberal economic experiment in its purest form (Délano & Traslaviña, 1989; Garreton Merino & Newman, 2001; Garreton Merino, 2003, 2005).

At the time, civil society was deeply connected to the political parties of the 20th century. Prior to the coup, the student, labour and arts movements were powerful forces driving shifts toward greater participation and equality in the educational, economic and cultural spheres, questioning the traditional hegemony of land owners, conservative forces in the Catholic Church, and the media. During the military years, the most active citizen groups were human rights organizations, formed by family members and survivors of violations. Small groups, usually articulated by the left or Christian Democratic parties organized students, pobladores (people from the poor areas of major cities) and remnants of labour unions, devastated by the repression. In the 1980s, these efforts erupted in anti-hunger marches, days of sometimes violent protest, and other anti-regime actions (Garretón Merino, 2005, 2009; Oxhorn, 1995).

With the massive protests of the 1980s, repression ebbed. By the late 1980s, environmental groups emerged, concerned about depredation of Chile's native forests and extinctions, along with the peace-oriented Casa de la Pasa. These fostered issue-based participation, independent of political parties. In the 1990s, after Pinochet's defeat in the 1988 plebiscite, Chile began to feel its way back to ‘normalcy’. Terror remained pervasive, however, and two major sabre-rattling episodes reinforced the sense that the peace was precarious and no one should rock the boat. The left-centre Concertación government was reluctant to challenge the system that Pinochet had left in place, reinforced by hundreds of decrees signed into law during his last months.

Municipal governments were headed by military appointees until 1993. Even then, elections under the rules inherited from the regime severely limited who could get elected, and what they could do. At the grassroots level, a few neighbourhoods started to organize, concerned about garbage (Estación Central, Barrio Yungay), heritage (Valparaíso) and other local issues. The Bellavista arts neighbourhood was among the first to reorganize against noise, corruption and other threats.

Toward the end of 1996, the Bellavista neighbourhood association heard the first rumours of a highway, the Costanera Norte. Its purpose was to improve car travel from the wealthy suburbs in the eastern foothills of the Andes, westward into the city centre and beyond, to the airport, ports and sea resorts on the coast (Figure 1). The project was the brainchild of an ambitious socialist, Ricardo Lagos, who was public works minister and on his way to becoming president of Chile.

Figure 1 A map of the highway project cutting through the centre of Santiago, affecting mostly low-income neighbourhoods with low car ownership rates and therefore little opportunity to use it. The large green patch is the San Cristobal Hill around which the Coordinadora organizations were located. The yellow line is the final path of this sector of the highway—under the river, so it left three of the four Coordinadora communities intact. Source: Living City.

The country's first urban concession, the 33-km highway stood to benefit speculators who owned land on the periphery of the city, at the cost of the vast majority of people who travelled by foot, bicycle and public transport. In 1991, the modal split was just 16% for private cars, versus 54% for public transport, 22% walking, 2% cycling and 2% other. By 2000, car use had risen to 22.2%, public transport had fallen to 33.4%, walking and cycling accounted for 40% and other modes 4% (SECTRA, 2006a).

Bellavista spearheaded Chile's first anti-highway movement, in the older neighbourhoods just north of the city centre. These included poor, middle- and high-income residential areas, and the central market, known as the Vega (Table 1). In 1997, 25 organizations from these communities formed the Coordinadora No a la Costanera Norte, a coalition to campaign against the highway project. The Coordinadora stood out for the diversity of its membership, its insistence on valuing both environmental and social rationales opposing the highway and its commitment to maintaining the voice of each organization, and therefore working through a collective leadership (Ducci, 2000, 2004a, 2004b; Allard, 2003).

Table 1 Municipalities crossed by the Costanera Norte highway project

	Name	%poverty (2006)	Household per capita income (1996)^a	UNDP human development ranking	Cars/1,000 inhabitants	Population (1995)
High income	Vitacura	4.4	854	1	308	79,914
	Las Condes	2.3	777	2		228,030
	Providencia	3.5	728	3		114,195
	Lo Barnechea	8.1	667	6		63,368
Middle income	Santiago	7.3	461	17	115	214,563
Low-income, high-poverty areas	Independencia	6.0	388	82	9393	70,986
	Quinta Normal	10.8	340	88		110,071
	Recoleta	12.4	316	93		156,671
	Pudahuel	7.1	267	100		169,684
	Cerro Navia	17.5	243	143		153,716

Notes: Of the 10 municipal areas affected by the Costanera Norte highway project, three saw significant resistance: the middle- to high-income Providencia, and the low-income Independencia and Recoleta areas. Population, Seremi Planificación y Coordinación (2009); Income per capita: Agostini (2010); %poverty per comuna, Casen (2006). UNDP/PNUD (2004b), Anexo Estadístico, UNDP/PNUD (2004b). Cars per thousand, SECTRA (2006b) (East, Centre, North).

a Converted from pesos to dollars, using the Central Bank average dollar: peso exchange 1996 (Central Bank 2003–2006).

The Coordinadora took over the weak participatory process required by the country's new environmental law, insisting on equal time with the highway's powerful proponent, and drawing in academic and NGO expertise to build its arguments. The debate expanded, from the government's monolithic ‘highways, yes or yes’ to ‘highways yes or no’ and, in the ensuing years, forged a significant citizen voice in favour of public transport, cycling and sustainable transport measures.

In 1999, the project was shelved, but in the early 2000s, President Frei rescheduled and, after several failed tenders, a consortium submitted a winning bid. By then, the guarantees to the company were substantial (Engel et al., 1999; Quijada, 2003; Silva, 2004), but the company was unwilling to face a hostile citizen movement. Negotiations ensued between firm and government, which led to an agreement (and government subsidies) that put the highway under the Mapocho River in the Coordinadora's territories, at a cost, as of 2011, of $500 million (MOP-Chile, 2012). The coalition had not stopped the project, but it saved three of the four neighbourhoods and achieved compensation for those displaced (renters as well as homeowners).

The Coordinadora's sometimes contradictory nature reflected the diversity of the groups affected by the highway project and powerful local identities, shaped by their location in some of the city's most historic neigbhourhoods. Unlike later highway projects in new, edge city ghettos, organizers benefitted from the experience of elderly neighbours who participated prior to the 1973 coup. Their actions were also nourished by pride of place, the result of powerful anti-establishment identities characteristic of communities along the north—for many the ‘wrong’—side of the Mapocho river. Residents, markets, artists and intellectuals both lived and worked in the territories under threat. This created commonalities across class differences, which by some measures are even stronger in Chile than racism or sexism elsewhere (UNDP/PNUD, 2004a).

At a time when most civic organizations were defined by whether they supported or opposed General Pinochet, the coalition included people from every side. This helped to break with the tradition of clientelism that had been reinforced by the regime. The Coordinadora offered one of the first glimpses of what an independent citizen group might be, in an urban rather than the wilderness context in which environmental groups were operating, far from cities and particularly the capital, Santiago, where 40% of the Chilean population lives. This often meant walking a political tightrope, as in Bellavista, for example, where many saw Ricardo Lagos' efforts to win the presidency as a revindication of Salvador Allende, the socialist president who died in the 1973 coup.

One important reason why this shift was possible was the diversity of participants in the Coordinadora, which was highly unusual in the heavily segregated city of Santiago. This reflected the scope of a highway project crossing the entire city, in contrast with other urban conflicts, focusing on individual projects in homogenous neighbourhoods: high-rise buildings in medium- or low-density sectors, the noise, garbage or heritage-destruction issues that triggered participation in Yungay or Bellavista. The Coordinadora's participants came from the middle-/high-income Providencia municipal jurisdiction, and middle- and low-income Recoleta and Independencia (Table 1).

This unity was possible because although the different groups represented thousands of people, the active groups were very small, usually 12–25 people, permitting intense, honest and often difficult debates. Although NGO advisors argued that environmental issues should trump social needs, the Coordinadora built an agenda based on considering all groups' concerns as legitimate and equal. Moreover, it rejected a single-leader model, and took representatives of all the different communities and groups to each meeting with authorities. Workshops and interviews with former leaders of the Coordinadora (conducted in 2010–2011) found that these processes provided them with essential skills: how to read plans, how to speak up, argue and negotiate with those in power. Moreover, these skills remained useful long after the conflict was over.

Thus, the Coordinadora served as a very real school for citizenship learning, following the learning spiral defined by Merrifield in her study of how effective citizen skills are developed (Table 2).

Table 2 Citizenship learning and the Coordinadora

Citizenship learning should	The Coordinadora
1. Help people acquire new knowledge by linking to the core concepts in their existing patterns of knowledge	Started from each community's/leader's survival and environmental aspirations, to acquire and structure new knowledge appropriately
2. Practice what it preaches, provide experiences of engaging in democracy not just information about it	Functioned in a horizontal manner, practicing direct democracy, as key to committing, training and empowering leaders from diverse organizations
3. Provide opportunities to practice problem solving and to become self-aware about their problem solving processes	Organizing the campaign, which involved challenges on the streets, in the judicial, environmental, communications and financial spheres required sensitive, aware problem solving
4. Provide opportunities to re-present experience in different ways, in order to deepen analysis and understanding	Reframed imposed narratives (‘selfish neighbours’, ‘self-interested market people’) to articulate their communities' needs as democratic rights, essential to social justice
5. Allow spiral learning (revisiting and understanding at a deeper level), to facilitate growth and development	Collective deliberations involved all participants contributing their knowledge, willingness to act, ideas and capacities, and constant analysis of the state of the campaign formed part of these processes, thus developing critical and analytical skills
6. Provide ‘scaffolding’ opportunities, in which those who are more experienced help novices with tasks that they cannot quite manage themselves, giving control back to the novice when he or she can manage alone	Each community had specific strengths and weaknesses; through collective action in the Coordinadora, the tendency was to supplement weaknesses and limit errors, through collective analysis and decision-making
7. Provide practice at all levels of reflection from immediate to deeper self-examination	Generated a variety of spaces, mostly informal, that encouraged a variety of reflection
8. Best be conducted in the context of communities of practice—establishing group norms, values, language, meanings and purposes	Successfully created a collective identity based on common practices across diversity during the anti-highway campaign, and passed this along to Living City
9. Incorporate a range of cultural expressions and social activities to create the learning community	Combined a range of experiences, interests, spaces for participation, learning and action
10. Engage with values	Questioned assumed values (inequality as symbolized by the highway), counterposing issues of rights

Source: Own elaboration using Merrifield's 10 components of citizen learning (column 1), Merrifield (2001, pp. 28–29).

Moving from Protest to Proposals: Living City (2000–2010)

In 2000, the Coordinadora's leadership made an unusual decision. Rather than returning to ‘normal’ life after three intensive years of campaigning, they decided to use the knowledge and contacts acquired to help their declining neighbourhoods. They founded Living City (Ciudad Viva) to go beyond defensive strategies and propose new transport, heritage, recycling and citizen empowerment initiatives to restore their communities.

The shift from a loosely knit coordinating body to a citizens' organization consciously trying to elbow its way into city planning at the local and regional level was enormous. Choosing to participate was very different from feeling forced to, in order to defend deeply felt values, beloved people and places that were an integral part of one's identity.

In analyzing this during the early years, the central core (community leaders and staff) saw themselves as emerging from the victim stance that was their first response to the highway, to define themselves as survivors. With Living City, they insisted on becoming equal partners. Table 3 summarizes the main changes involved.

Table 3 Organizational characteristics compared

	Coordinadora (1995–1999)	Living City (2000–2004)
Attitude to participation	Forced, through conflict	Part of lifestyle, some conflict but also co-operation and eventually co-production
Main feelings	Humiliation, fear, feeling mistreated by authorities, insecurity, mistrust	Friendly, supportive, rewarding, growing self-confidence, mutual confidence, trust
Knowledge	Seeking help, information	Experienced, shares, helps, actively seeks new
Skills	Vary widely across the groups	Shared more evenly, also more specialization
Member organizations	Many informal, some formal organizations, some tensions	Many formal and informal organizations, working together
Continuity	Constant interruptions and abrupt shifts when leadership changed	Continuity of issues and support for continuity of organizations, although problems remain
Resources	Uneven access to resources, sharing	Resources better managed, able to obtain more
Relationship authorities	‘Them and us’, some ‘friends’	Project-based critiques, collaboration on some initiatives, especially senior technical staff
Type of links	Bond internally, links with ‘outsiders’	Bond internally, bridge through Living City

Source: Own elaboration.

Living City worked extensively with local groups and individuals in the central neighbourhoods that formed its home territory, but it also reached upward to interact with regional offices and national ministries, and outward to bring in international expertise. Throughout its first decade, the kinds of interactions captured by Innes' and Booher's DIAD (diversity-interdependece-authentic dialogue) were apparent and did facilitate significant levels of collaboration. Two additional factors were equally important, however: innovation, through citizen-led participatory methods, and the introduction of new, evidence-based knowledge. This ability to contribute ‘technical’ knowledge became Living City's hallmark and won its critical respect from partners in government and the private sector (interviews key government partners, 2010–2011).

The role of citizen-led initiatives in innovation was brought home by its early projects: Recycle to Live Better (2002, Fondo de las Américas) and Transport for equality (UNDP, 2003). The recycling project in particular took place after Providencia municipal authorities refused to consider the Bellavista neighbourhood in its plans: the neighbourhood they chose for a recycling pilot did not respond well, and the project failed. In contrast, an external evaluation found the Living City initiative in Bellavista and the markets of Recoleta (Vega Chica, Tirso de Molina, Pérgola Santa María) very successful, involving diverse local actors of all ages and social classes (Valle, 2003).

These successes opened the way to more sophisticated projects: Building a Living City (Avina, 2004–2007); Active citizenship for sustainable, just and inclusive cities (European Union, 2010–2011); Cycling-inclusive Santiago (Interface for Cycling Expertise, 2007–2010); as well as carrying out Santiago's first Green Map (Natura, 2007–2008) and transparency initiatives (Open Society Institute, 2010, 2012). Its methods involved menus of possible activities for participants to choose from, car-free activities, collective mapping, charrettes and open-street events. Partners had access to a Local Initiatives Fund, distributed using participatory methods.

Living City won several prestigious awards from independent (2001, 2003) and government (2008) bodies, which reflected rigorous external evaluations of its work. The Citizen–Government Cycling Roundtable, which it co-designed and coordinated with Santiago's regional government (2007–2010), secured funds for new cycling facilities (US$48 million), consensuses on more appropriate designs and standards, and both citizen and municipal inputs into the regional cycling master plan, originally designed by a consultant in the late 1990s, but little known beyond the government's inner circles (Sagaris & Olivo, 2010).

Like the Coordinadora before it, Living City worked essentially through small groups of 5–25 people. But the people who self-selected to participate had extensive networks of contacts, ‘relational trees’, which together generated whole and very diverse ‘relational forests’. Figure 2 gives an idea of the different kinds of contacts that emerged from the organization's first charrette, out of which came a remodelling of Bellavista's main street, Pío Nono. A dense ‘community communications weave’ nourished these efforts, based mainly on the face-to-face relationships between participants, but reaching out to include thousands of others through a weekly radio show (2002–2005, 10,000–15,000 listeners) and the flagship publication, La Voz de La Chimba. ‘The Voice’ began as a wall-poster during the Coordinadora's campaign, grew into a 5,000 strong print newsletter (2002), then became a periodical (circulation 15,000–20,000).

Figure 2 Relational trees and forests. Each colour represents the different kinds of participants' efforts to improve Bellavista, as they communicated throughout their different relationship trees. Small groups involving everyone from street vendors, through neighbours and public officials communicated across class and other boundaries to build consensus throughout a beleagured urban community, which led to a successful project.

Living City's work addressed both planning and city systems. Collaboration built during the early years, particularly with the municipalities of Providencia and Recoleta, deepened with time, and remains a major resource for both public and citizen sector actors.

The cycling roundtable, which was probably the most complete expression of the organization's learning since 1997, saw significant impacts. In the five years since the process was set in motion, cycle promotion by Living City's allies, particularly the open streets initiative, CicloRecreovía, and the Bicicultura festival, combined with the women's cycling school that Living City developed with the women's cycling group, Macletas, actively promoted cycling. Other factors, among them the dramatic failures of bus system reform in 2007–2008, influenced modal shift, but civil society played a significant role in getting more funding assigned to increasing cycling infrastructure, providing education, and running campaigns to promote more cycling. Indeed, kilometres of infrastructure quadrupled (2007–2011) and the number of cyclists has risen by 15–20% annually (UyT & CiudadViva, 2012). Cycling has gone from being stigmatized as a ‘poor man's ride’ to a trendy transport mode. President Bachelet made cycling a priority for her government (2006–2010), as did President Piñera, who led the opposition to power in 2010. These cross-cutting policy commitments resulted from efforts by members of the citizen–government–ICE roundtable.

Unlike anti-highway movements in North America, it took over a decade for the citizen movements that followed the Coordinadora to approach politics directly. There were (and are) no elections for the Santiago or other regional governments. Barriers to independent candidates remain high, because a slate system makes it virtually impossible for anyone outside a political party to win.2

In 2010–2012, however, Living City partnered with organizations in Santiago, Valparaíso and elsewhere to research and approve citizens' agenda for just, sustainable and inclusive cities. This was presented to candidates during the 2012 municipal elections, several of whom committed to the goals and a monitoring process, to ensure their realization. In Santiago, Living City's former president, Josefa Errazuriz, was elected mayor of the wealthy municipal area of Providencia, ousting a former army colonel, famous for his tributes to colleagues involved in human rights violations and his expulsions of striking students from Providencia's public schools. Ten percent of Santiago's population of 6 million now live in municipal areas governed by mayors committed to the Citizens' Agenda, and two million more work in these central areas.

At the national level, significant changes also occurred. Upon election as president, Lagos (2000–2006), who as minister of public works had been the Coordinadora's main opponent, called them an example of the commitment necessary to build a more sustainable society. He issued a presidential decree ordering all government agencies to establish procedures for citizen participation (Lagos, 2000).

His successor, Michelle Bachelet, ran as a ‘citizen’ candidate and made participation central to her political platform. During her government (2006–2010) the country passed its first right to information law and a law to encourage citizen participation (GobiernoChile, 2005, 2011). This progress was driven by the work of other groups dedicated to these issues, but the Coordinadora/Living City's work was an important reference, and Living City was recognized as a major actor in urban planning (Ivan Poduje, 2008; Tironi et al., 2010a; Iván Poduje, 2011).

Discussion: Citizen Planners as Catalysts for Change

The Coordinadora reflects the kind of modest but determined social movement that often emerges around highway projects (Hovey, 1998; Mohl, 2004, 2012; Schragg, 2004; Ladd, 2008), while Living City became the first of a new generation of civic-minded, activist urban groups. In its wake, Ciudadanos por Valparaíso, organizations for the Barrio Yungay, and other groups appeared, generating an increasingly rich civil society in the urban sphere.

During the anti-highway campaign, the intense debates across enormous differences, within a group of diverse organizations held together by mutual need, generated a horizontal dynamic, which closely matches the kind of deliberation discussed earlier. They also marked a shift from the clientelism documented during the military and post-military years (Oxhorn, 1995; Taylor, 2004) toward a new citizenship, based on rights and principles of equality and accountability.

At first, local governments responded with paternalism, but by the 2007–2010 cycling initiative, the regional government, national transport ministry and several municipalities were willing to co-produce participation in the Citizen—Government roundtable.

The Coordinadora's founders faced a largely hidden urban governance system, located mainly in national ministries and their regional offices, rather than in the more visible municipalities, with their elected councils (Huerta, 2000; Posner, 2009). At first, local organizations participated through a single-issue, campaign-oriented body capable of uniting wills, inviting support, and mapping the relevant governance actors.

When these communities founded Living City, they were, in effect, responding to multi-scalar governance by creating a multi-scalar citizen organization, able to act at the micro-neighbourhood, but also at the regional, national and global scales, as its partnership with the Dutch exemplified. These findings are consistent with Somerville's research in the UK (2011). Just as Susskind and Elliott (1983) defined three types of participation, Somerville cites three equivalent approaches to governance (Table 4), with the hierarchical form prevailing in Chile, although citizens such as Living City aspired to co-governance.

Table 4 Categories of citizenship, participation and governance compared

	Main types/categories
	1	2	3
Citizen participation stances (Atwood)	Victim	Survivor	Leadership
Citizen participation (level of organization)	None or limited	Ad hoc coalition (social movement)	Citizen institution
Citizen participation: predominant interaction	Others help	Others help and work with	Lead systemic change
Planning	Non-planning	Anti-planning	Inclusive planning
Types of participation (Susskind et al.)	Paternalism	Conflict	Co-production
Types of governance (Kooiman)	Hierarchical	Self-governance	Co-governance
Political/policy system (my categories, based on Tillly)	Authoritarian	Contested	Democratizing
Power direction	Top down	Bottom up	Middle out
Key outcome	Imposition	Resistance	Autonomy and resilience, co-responsibility

Source: Own elaboration based on typologies developed by Atwood (1972), and used by Living City (2001 onward), Susskind and Elliott (1983) and Kooiman (cited in Somerville 2011).

Somerville adds that state-sponsored participatory tools, such as local strategic partnerships or area committees, often capture and neutralize citizens' proposals for change, but he notes that sometimes citizens captivate local officials. Olsson and Hysing (2011) refer to ‘inside activism’, when staff actively work for change within a government body. Living City's work illustrates both, suggesting that it catalyzed a whole ecology of actors in specific niches in the policy environment, in favour of several innovative, more socially just and sustainable initiatives. This was apparent in the cycling roundtable, but also in its efforts to renew Pío Nono, the main street in the Bellavista neighbourhood. Through an adaptation of a planning ‘charrette’ (2003, 2006), Living City pulled together citizens, businesses and technical staff at the two municipalities, who had never met before, despite Bellavista falling within both jurisdictions. Municipal staff then waged a three-year battle for funding and supervised implementation with participation coordinated by Living City.

Success hinges on the autonomy (and credibility) of citizen organizations, as Somerville notes and these experiences illustrate. In this sense, several researchers (Rydin & Pennington, 2000; Boonstra & Boelens, 2011) find important differences, in terms of results and buy-in, between citizen-led and government-led participatory processes. They note that citizen-led initiatives are often more effective, in terms of both implementation and co-responsibility for results.

Portugali (2011) goes further, arguing that planning is both a profession, exercised by trained ‘experts’, and a skill exercised by ordinary citizens, working from their everyday expertise. This case supports his view and reveals some of the nuts and bolts behind how self-generated citizen organizations make a significant contribution, particularly in challenging business-as-usual debates.

The changes described here were part of major shifts in Chilean politics and society as different currents sought to achieve their goals through democratization. These kinds of processes are extremely complex and difficult to study in ways that provide answers useful to those involved and others grappling with similar issues. To understand this case, it was necessary to examine the literature on democracy and democratization, sustainability and transport planning, social movements, and adult education (where much of the research on citizen learning is concentrated). Planning theory and practice provided an interdisciplinary perspective that helped bring the key intersections between these fields into focus. To do so, thinking about how to plan from the perspective of complexity theory (Byrne, 2001, 2003; Chettiparamb, 2006; Innes & Booher, 2010; Portugali, 2011), scale (Somerville, 2011) and the deliberation that makes meaningful collaboration possible (Healey, Forester, Gastil, among others) was useful.

By bringing these disciplines together to examine this case (Table 3), we can see the interplay between key social, political and institutional factors that enable or paralyze the development of active citizenship and robust citizen organizations in recently democratizing cultures. The fact that power can function ‘from the middle out’ (column 3, penultimate line), as it did through the cycling roundtable, offers an opportunity for real collaboration that moves beyond the autocracy of ‘top-down’ models and the conflict inherent in ‘bottom-up’ campaigning. This originated outside the official planning system, but can nonetheless be considered consistent with thinking about ‘co-production’ of urban policies (Susskind & Elliott, 1981).

Democracy does not appear magically just because someone holds an election: a democratic ‘culture’ must be grown, and that requires looking beyond individual citizens, to consider the organizations that give them clout, capacity, credibility and continuity. To date, very little discussion about participation focuses on the role of organizations and the importance of creating them where few or none exist.

This study also suggests that any meaningful discussion of ‘participation’ must address context, whether this refers to macro-conditions favouring authoritarian or more democratic procedures; or the micro-conditionsand skills that allow individual citizens to meet, discuss and reach agreements they are able to turn into meaningful, ongoing, consistent action.

Context speaks to the importance of getting the most out of participation, not only in terms of planning goals, but also to build a more active, committed and effective citizenry. This is particularly important when democratic structures are new and vulnerable, and/or innovation is needed, as occurs today, amidst global climate change and other major threats to urban ways of living, based on 20th century automobility. This case suggests the importance of making social (and political) sustainability a high priority, given that achieving economic and environmental sustainability depends on changing how people think, feel and act, individually and together.

This case also reveals a disturbing paradox, ubiquitous in developing contexts. Although, as discussed, many informed observers consider Living City a major contributor to planning and innovation, its actual trajectory has involved successive waves of growth and near destruction. It almost collapsed (2004) and completely collapsed (2006) or significantly changed (2010), showing a phoenix-type evolutionary pattern. Like many citizen organizations, it lives forever on the brink, investing enormous effort in survival.

Similarly, despite national laws requiring support for neighbourhood organizations, local politicians routinely ignore them, undermining their ability to function. This puts them a long way from the democratically run associations effectively co-managing neighbourhoods in the USA, as described by Thomson (2001) and Sirianni (2009), among others. This case, then, provides evidence supporting critiques that focus on the nature and quality of participation as process, arguing that the interactions between citizen organizations, policy institutions and context are crucial.

While governments pay substantial sums to consultants to do research, organize participation and communications, the dominant neoliberal mindset demands that citizens ‘participate’ for free, without guaranteeing the conditions necessary for robust organizations. Thus, whole societies fail to invest in civic capacity and communities are robbed of their knowledge, their credibility and the opportunity to participate with dignity in planning for change, in our high-risk, rapidly evolving world.

Additional information

Funding

Funding

This research was supported by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 752-2009-2380]; Centro de Estudios de Desarrollo Urbano Sustentable (CEDEUS) [Conicyt FONDAP number 15110020].

Notes

^1. The military regime's actions included not only expelling many professors but shutting down social science departments at universities and eliminating social science courses from the ‘hard’ disciplines, such as medicine, architecture and engineering. All this reinforced a strong rational-technical bias, while neoliberalism practically eliminated the word ‘planning’ from the vocabulary.

^2. This very convoluted system is hard to understand. Posner notes that in municipal elections the system meant that ‘on average, 43% of members elected in metropolitan Santiago in 1996 received a lower percentage of the vote than the highest vote getters among losing candidates’ (Posner, 1999).