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Traditionally, local development is managed by a team of planners which collects information and technical analysis so as to make sure that the city will adapt to an ever changing social, economic and international environment. Planning is considered as a highly technical work that requires expertise. However, there are two checks and balances that make the process somehow democratic: the first one is citizens’ consultation; maps, charts and leaflets can be distributed and exhibited, and citizens are asked to express their opinion on the way technicians envision their common future. Second, local elections make sure that there is a majority of citizens that approves the way the options prepared and decided by the city’s leadership.
However, these democratic checks and balances are not exactly similar to “citizens’ participation.” The point, here, is not only that there is a moral and political imperative to require citizens’ approval on the choices that ground their future, it is rather that active citizens’ participation is highly favorable to higher-quality local development.
For sure, involving citizens from the start on issues such as traffic management, industry parks, internationalization, safety control and other issues typical of developmental policies will make for longer and more complicated procedures. On the other hand, ensuring a continuous flux of information and feedbacks, enlisting the cultural riches of actives, informed citizens, diversifying the resources that contribute to a more balanced model of development, all of this has remarkably long term effects on a city’s overall health and level of consent. Citizens’ participation is per se a factor of sustainability: it reduces risks of corruption, hasty decision or dominance of industrial lobbies. It ensures that concerns about air and water control, schooling and quality of life are sufficiently taken into account. It helps to envision a larger array of alternatives on developmental issues and to balance the economic, social and cultural dimension, all necessary for achieving humane, integral growth. Finally, citizens’ participation raises their overall level of satisfaction, as participants feel that the city that takes shape under their eyes is really theirs, and that they are the actor of the public space in which they work and live.
Said in another way, the first asset that a city should make use of when planning for its future is the cultural diversity that exists in its midst. Enhancing diversity is the best strategy for fostering sustainability. Healthy, sustainable community development is to be based on citizens’ active participation, and the quality of such participation is itself a factor of the way the cultural resources of the community are appreciated and fostered in the diversity of their expressions.
Positive citizens’ participation in city’s development is to be based on:
- a sense of sustainability, fostered by the taking into account of the cultural diversity of the local population and the political expression of this same diversity;
- a sense of space, encouraged by a good an environmentally-friendly management of the public space that all citizens use day after day
- a process of empowerment that goes through the establishment of neighborhood committees;
- the involvement of these committees into the budgetary process, first by delegating a portion of the city budget to them, second by making these committees an outlet of intensive consultation for all major projects
- the openness of the budgetary and decision process, allowing all citizens to learn and intervene during the whole decision-making process.
Most cities, in Asia and elsewhere, have still to ponder over this set of simple rules if they truly want to foster citizens’ participation and sustainable local development…
This editorial is based on a longer presentation made at a Forum on community revitalization held by the Kaohsiung City Government, February 27, 2008.
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