Engaging the community in the planning process is currently one of the most controversial topics on the planning table first being raised by the Skeffington Report in 1969. This proves that achieving the objectives of the planning system can only be brought into implementation if the development process is built on the public best interest. The famous phrase “Think Global, Act Local”, in the Agenda 21 (UNCED, 1992), reflects the importance of local community participation in the planning process to influence wider scale aims. In other words, the local communities have , in theory, the agency to determine the success of any development that takes place in their local areas through their collective voice on matters of the public realm (see Healey, 1996), and achieving success at the local level is the only guarantee for a sustainable whole.
The use of ‘Community’ as a place-based concept (usually the scale of neighbourhood) made people to get together not because of what they have in common (e.g. age, class, gender, ethnicity, interest, belief…etc), but because they lived in a target area. Consequently the issues chosen for action were not always or even usually those most salient to the community as a whole. “The search for issues on which everyone could agree usually resulted in taking action on the lowest common denominator” (Sarkissian and Perlgut et al, 1986:12). This is because planning authorities usually have difficulties in understanding the social webs, on which the local community is built, the matter that causes certain community groups to be excluded from participation practice and social injustice to occur. Moreover, “community participation tends to be dominated by a small group of insiders who are disproportionately involved in a large number of governance activities”. In addition, it is more often that “the few people involved in one setting tend to be the same few people in another setting”. (Skidmore and Bound et al, 2006: 6)
This raises the question of ‘How inclusive is community participation: Which community groups are excluded in practice?’
What is ‘Community Participation’?
There is a wealth of literature on the definition of community participation. According to Burns and Heywood et al (2004), community participation “concerns the engagement of individuals and communities in decisions about things that affect them.” (Burns and Heywood et al, 2004:2). While Skindmore and Bound et al (2006) have defined community participation as the “formal involvement by citizens in the decision-making bodies or structures” (Skindmore and Bound et al, 2006: vii)
It has been noticed that decision-making structures and bodies “often tend to create and exacerbate injustice”. Besides, “policy formation in welfare capitalist society tends to be depoliticized and operates through a relatively closed club of interest-group bargainers” (Young, 1990, in Campbell and Fainstein 1996:351). This motivated many theorists to introduce the concept of participation in literature, not only as a way to carry out planning, but also as a tool to deal with community differences in order to achieve social democracy.
Thus, it is important to note that ‘participation’ has many meanings as a “feel-good” word, but “there are fundamental differences between participation as a means and/or an end”. Participation as a means is “information, consultation, even devolved decision-making, but with an instrumental objective”. But, participation as an end is “the fundamental acceptance of individual or group rights to self-govern” (Jenkins, 2007: lecture).
Besides, Burns and Heywood argue that “community participation is not the same as consultation”. “Many organizations say that they have a community participation strategy when they mean that they have a consultation strategy. Community participation’ means that “communities are playing an active part and have a significant degree of power and influence.” (Burns and Heywood et al, 2004:2)
Public attitude and the role of the planner:
The public have a negative attitude towards participation as “many people are not able or willing to take the time to engage in ‘participation’, and some groups who have a clear stake in planning outcomes are too diffused to have become effective participators, and rarely if ever emerge as definable actors in the development process” (Cullingworth and Nadin, 1994:249). Moreover, “experience has shown that public meetings will never be well attended unless a sense of ‘urgency’ exists. We do not believe the communities are necessarily apathetic, but that people will order their priorities to do other things if they do not feel that their input is urgently required.” (Sarkissian and Perlgut et al, 1986:45)
This issue should be carefully dealt with because, generally, “people tend to be constrained in their relationship with the planning system; they tend to engage with it when it affects them or when circumstances change, so this is a negative aspect of the planning system.” (The Scottish Parliament, 2006, URL)
This meagerness in participation programs is related to the fact that “planners, untrained in the skills of mass communication, have relied on traditional methods (exhibitions, public meetings, questionnaires) which have not been successful in involving the community” (Sarkissian and Perlgut et al, 1986:12). This comes in accordance with Forester’s argument that participation “simply scares the daylights out of many planners” (Forester, 1998:8). This is because planners usually feel that involving people can disrupt the process and cause time constraints. This attitude, according to Forester (1998), is due to many planners’ lack of skills necessary to deal with difference.
According to Cullingworth and Nadin (1994), there is a difficult link between the concepts of public participation and the traditional representative democracy. “The workers themselves will need to be clear about their professional role, and this will depend upon their training and the organizational structure within which they work” (Cullingworth and Nadin, 1994:253). It is an essential issue in order to avoid criticism of the behaviour of the workers or the planners who are involved in the implementation of public participation frameworks and who are in direct touch with the local communities.
The planner is looked at as a “‘facilitator’ who identified and mediated between different interest groups affected by planning decisions, still in search of protecting the ‘public interest’” (Smith, 2005:52). Being a facilitator raises two issues. The first refers to ‘inclusionary ethic’. “This emphasizes a moral duty to ask, as arenas are being set up, who are members of the political community, how are they to get access to the arena in such a way that their point of view can be appreciated as well as their voices heard, and how can they have a task in the process throughout. This means moving beyond simple conceptions of distributive justice (everyone has equal standing) to a recognition of diversity (all groupings of people should have equal ability to put over their views) (Young, 1990).” (Healey, 1996, in Campbell and Fainstein 1996:245)
The second issue recognizes that “the ‘where’ of strategic discussion may shift about, and use different times. Not only may it be helpful to encourage discussion in several institutional places at the early stages of a strategic planning experience (e.g. council chambers, business clubs, community halls, schools, radio, and phone-ins).” (Healey, 1996, in Campbell and Fainstein 1996:245)
Planning education and social diversity:
Improving the planners’ performance in the approach towards a more inclusive participation emphasizes the importance of maintaining the planning education system in relation to issues of community social diversity. This is through developing “learning environments that meet the challenge of diversity.” (Thomas, 1996. in Campbell and Fainstein 1996:356)
There is an urgent need “to prepare students to function in multicultural work environments: to develop more effective models of diversity in planning schools, eliminating existing points of ineffectiveness, disjointedness, or contradiction; and to develop more effective ways of teaching planning students how to promote social action and reform of inequities.” (Thomas, 1996. in Campbell and Fainstein 1996:356)
As an attempt towards a multicultural education system, teachers have developed ingenious ways to teach the students to value their own diversity. Others have recommended administrative/institutional change or mentoring programs to insure retention of women and people of colour. In other words, “the term pluralism is used to mean plural streams of specialties within the planning profession, divorced from issues of race or gender.” (Thomas, 1996. in Campbell and Fainstein 1996:361; 370)
This approach towards building in the ability of the new planners’ generation to understand and deal with the community social differences helps to take a step towards a more inclusive participation process. This is through having the intention and the action towards designing new participation techniques that can ensure that the collective community voice taken on planning issues represents the perspectives of all community groups exist within the development targeted area.
