Participatory planning

Participatory planning is an urban planning paradigm that emphasizes involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural. It is often considered as part of community development. Participatory planning aims to harmonize views among all of its participants as well as prevent conflict between opposing parties. In addition, marginalized groups have an opportunity to participate in the planning process.Town and country planning might be described as the art and science of ordering the use of land and the character of siting of buildings and communication routes so as to secure the maximum practicable degree of economy, convenience and beauty (Keeble,1952)It suggested the need for a new kind of planner altogether, one who was trained in analyzing and understanding how cities and regions functioned spatially in economic and social terms – a planner, that is trained in economic geography or the social sciences rather than architecture or surveying (Taylor 1998)1.'Plans-on-the-map', which is a website that allows citizens to get acquainted with existing plans Participatory planning is an urban planning paradigm that emphasizes involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural. It is often considered as part of community development. Participatory planning aims to harmonize views among all of its participants as well as prevent conflict between opposing parties. In addition, marginalized groups have an opportunity to participate in the planning process. Responding to the gap between the desires of local communities, and government programs such as urban renewal, Sherry Arnstein wrote A Ladder of Citizen Participation to 'encourage a more enlightened dialogue'. She developed the ladder as a typology, with eight rungs ranging from various degrees of nonparticipation, to degrees of tokenism, and ultimately, citizen power. Her critical assault on planning methods of the time has informed policies affecting the growth and change in participatory methods, broadening access to planning processes. A 1971 U.S. Department of Transportation publication summarized seminars where professional planners, public administrators, and citizens debated the idea of participatory planning. The U.S. Department of Transportation recognized that citizens felt excluded from the current planning processes. In the seminar the following questions were asked: 'Why do you want citizens to participate? What kind of citizens should be included? When should citizen participation enter the planning process? How do you organize citizen participation? How much power should be invested in citizen participation groups? Where do local elected officials fit in the citizen participation element? What are the responsibilities of the planner regarding citizen participation?'. The consensus was that citizen participation is valuable for better planning as well as for minimizing confrontation; however, not everyone agreed on how to effectively involve citizens. Planning needed a structure to allow natural and meaningful input from citizens. In order for this to happen, planning needed to move away from its hierarchical model and move toward a reticular model. The reticular model would allow for more citizen participation. While there is some demand for a top-down approach with centralized decision-making from experts, participatory planning uses a bottom-up approach. Participatory planning aims to add more participation in decision-making, increase the legitimacy of politicians and officials, and provide for more criticism of experts' plans. The standard approach to planning can be defined in the following quote: This approach does not withstand the addition of complex regional and local socio-economic aspects. The top down model lacked a way to approach planning. Taylor proposes an entirely different approach to Keeble: Participatory planning demands that planners incorporate a variety of interest groups in their process. In the UN Habitat document Building Bridges Through Participatory Planning, Fred Fisher, president of the International Development Institute for Organization and Management, identifies Participatory Reflection And Action (PRA) as the leading school of participatory planning. He identifies Paulo Freire and Kurt Lewin as key pioneers, as well as claiming planning fathers Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford as participatory planners. Freire's belief that poor and exploited people can, and should be, enabled to analyze their own reality was a fundamental inspiration for the participatory planning movement. Lewin's relevance lay in his integration of democratic leadership, group dynamics, experiential learning, action research, and open systems theory, and his efforts to overcome racial and ethnic injustices. In general, PRA has been supplanted by Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), which emphasizes the links between the participatory process and action. Related work has been done on community-based participatory research (CBPR). Robert Chambers, whom Fisher considered a leading icon of the movement, defines PRA according to the following principles;