Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age

BASED ON THE premise that planning should be recognized as a “...political activity, central to the struggle towards more livable cities”, rather than as a state regulatory process, this book brings together 14 papers intended to ground the experiences of specific case studies in the theoretical debate on planning. Embedded in the concept of "civil society" are the key values of democratization, gender and cultural differences, and "human flourishing".

The papers are grouped into three sections. The first section presents a conceptual framework which contextualizes the arguments that follow. The second section, on theory, illustrates the debates at the heart of planning, with reference to such thinkers as Durkheim, Castells, Keane, Habermas and Foucault. It offers a sociology of planning at a moment when that process ceases to be based on the privileged knowledge of a group of professionals and finds expression instead through “...a variety of forms, including social mobilization and community activation for civil rights.” The principal of popular moral consensus is explored, as are the intellectual problems inherent in that principal.

The third section, on practice, has five papers that relate experiences drawn from case studies in the USA, South and Central America, East Asia and Germany. The first is Rebecca Abers’ case study of how inclusive democracy has been practicing at a local level in Porto Alegre, Brazil as a result of the election of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party). It describes the process through which more than 60,000 households were enabled to participate in the capital budgeting process. The description covers the institutional arrangements that made the process possible and the impacts that the success of that process have had on national political culture and local governance.

Two other case studies are also concerned with the "claiming of voice". The first, in Los Angeles, considers how élites seek to control environmentalism by "policing ecology" at the same time as prioritizing the free market and economic efficiency, while popular activists work towards practical socioecological reforms. The debate is grounded within the concerns and realities of fluid coalitions and the politics of the actual, rather than perceived, control of the urban environment. The second case study uses the experience of local environmental conflicts in Chile to argue in favour of "radical planning", to enable people to decide themselves how to develop their "life space" and to participate equitably in the benefits and costs implicit in any development. In this evolution of the planning process, the environment is seen as a vehicle rather than a target of reform.

The case study on Frankfurt documents the attempts in the early 1990s to integrate the city’s foreign migrant population (who have traditionally been excluded from the democratic process in Germany) and place them on an equal footing with German citizens. A description of the growth and activities of a board and associated fora representing 150 ethnic minorities in Frankfurt is followed by an evaluation of the strategy and its implications for the development of a true multiculturalism. The other paper that is based on practical experience seeks to interpret the “...ongoing globalization processes on the Asia Pacific rim in terms of poverty and the urban habitat.” Issues of exclusion, disempowerment, social fragmentation and marginalization recur as products of globalization, but the author points to the promise of "best-case scenarios", where resources are pooled, labour divided into complementary tasks, tenure and leadership legitimized, and communities empowered rather than undermined.