Participation and the modernization process
Participation and the modernization process
复制标题
参与和现代化进程
DOI：
10.1080/02665433.2011.527543
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发表时间：
2011
影响因子：
0.8
通讯作者：
S. (Hrsg.)
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Haumann;S. (Hrsg.)
During the last decades community-based planning has evolved into a dominant paradigm of planning policy. At present, a number of national and local programmes concerned with new development and urban renewal emphasize the importance of citizens’ participation and highlight it as an essential factor in the decision-making process. In contrast, planning during the height of modernist thought is today criticized as having been entirely legitimized by expert knowledge and presumptions constructed as to comply with standards of scientific rigidity and ‘objectivity’. The resulting planning practices, often referred to as constituting a technocratic regime, allegedly led to the exclusion of the citizenry and the removal of planning from democratic control.The presumed dichotomy dominates the narratives on the planning history of the late twentieth century. However, recent research suggests that this view is in need of revision. Planning in the context of the ubiquitous strife for modernization during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s did after all rely on citizens’ input to a considerable degree. To be sure, the influence of experts and powerful policy-makers had an immense impact but this, somewhat paradoxically, did not exclude substantial participation by affected citizens. On the contrary, technocratic planning and participatory elements appear to have amalgamated in the modernization process in a variety of ways, some of which will be discussed in this special issue. Drawing on the example of the Swiss Integral Concept for Transport, Stefan Sandmeier first analyses the practices of scientific planning, only to highlight its limits when confronted with long-established patterns of the Swiss political system. Elaborate proposals based on the principle of Cybernetics eroded in subsequent attempts to implement them, as consensusoriented decision-making and necessary referenda thwarted the concept. Kenny Cupers’ article turns the attention to one of the most renowned examples of modernist planning, the development of the French grands ensembles. In analysing the role of sociological research concerned with ‘the user’that went along with the construction of mass housing, Cupers reveals that an ‘expertise of participation’was both receptive of citizens’ involvement and at the same time constituted it within the domain of scientific urbanism. While Cupers shows how expertise shaped the conceptualization and rise of participation models, Sebastian Haumann demonstrates how participation was built in into planning based on expertise of an allegedly technocratic regime. Drawing on the example of Philadelphia, he examines attempts to foster grassroots involvement as part and parcel of a policy to modernize urban society. Picking up on the notion of ‘the user’, Peter Shapely’s contribution focuses on the discrepancies between concepts by which participatory elements were introduced in Britain at the end of the 1960s and practices of urban planning and housing provision at the local level. Shapely argues that concerns to involve citizens followed a much older discourse on consumer rights shared by housing activists in numerous British cities and experts and policy-makers on a national level but was distorted by local power relations.
