Civil society – a broader sphere than the community

This review is drawn from (Hasan, Sacha. 2012, Civil Society Participation in Urban Development in Syria).

The word ‘community’ is densely used in planning theory, policies and legislation. The most common use of ‘community’ is to refer to a territorial group (Johnston, et al., 2000 p. 101), while the more accurate use is to refer to a group which shares the same interests (Jenkins, 2007).

In ordinary speech, according to Young (1990), the term ‘community’ refers to “the people with whom one identifies in a specific locale. It refers to neighbourhood, church, schools. It also carries connotations of ethnicity, race, and other group identifications. For most people, a ‘community’ is a group that shares a specific heritage, a common self-identification, a common culture and set of norms” (Young, 1990 p. 343)

Healey (1996) gave two meanings to ‘community’.  “The first is spatially based, all those in a place who share a concern and/or are affected by what happens there. The second is stake based, that is, all those who, directly or indirectly, have an interest in or care about what the people in the first community are doing in a place” (Healey, 1996 p. 244).

But, there is still a less common usage of the word ‘community’ in de-constructing power relations, as “the second image carried in the word ‘community’ is as an opposition to a dominating force”. This image “draws individuals into a place-based moral order”.  It “draws individuals together into an aggregate interest, the citizens or ‘ordinary people’, versus powerful external force” (Healey, 2006 p. 124).

However, the concept of ‘community’ is now more difficult to pin down because of the broader spatial nature of planning issues and the fact that there is wider spatial interaction between places (Healey, 2006 pp. 122-126). Thus, the appeal of ‘community’ “can be reinterpreted to mean the assertion of the concerns of accomplishing life strategies and everyday life in the context of the forums and arenas in which political community finds expression, and in which collective activities are organized” (Healey, 2006 p. 126).

This researcher uses the term ‘community’ to refer to the group of people who share a spatial territory targeted by a certain development (the scale of the territory is decided by the scale of the development e.g. a local neighbourhood targeted for a regeneration project, a region targeted for a new transportation network,… etc), taking into consideration all the social differences this group may have (differences of interest). This definition is less complex and more relevant to the research purpose. This is because the research adopts a case study approach, where two developments are chosen for analysis and those are targeted to two areas. Thus, ‘community’ here refers to those targeted by the chosen developments. However, the social differences of people included are taken into account due to the effect these differences impose on the structure of society, formal and informal. Furthermore, they affect the institutional structure of the related urban development decision-making. These relations between the structure of civil society and urban development decision-making are further explained in this chapter.

On the other hand, the concept of ‘civil society’ is a much broader concept which might have been initiated by the recent complex spatial nature of planning under the circumstances of state disability and market competitiveness and self-interest vision of service production (Carley, et al., 2001; Douglass, et al., 1998). For Hall (1998) it is “a form of societal self-organization which allows for co-operation with the state whilst enabling individualism” (Johnston, et al., 2000 pp. 84-85; Hall, 1998).

Civil society exceeds the limits of the concept of ‘community’, to include all society segments which, in theory, lie outside both the sphere of production (private sector) and the state (Johnston, et al., 2000; Alexander, 2008). However, civil society economic components of non-profit and voluntary organisations form an active part of the production sphere of society, to an extent it is considered in some literature as an extension of the private sector (see Figure ‎2 1). Furthermore, civil society has a strong effect on the supply and demand of goods and services and, consequently, on the shape and function of the market. Thus, in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated (LSE, 2004). As such, civil society embraces “a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power” (LSE, 2004).

Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community groups, women's organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups (LSE, 2004). Against this, civil society organizations are classified in many ways—by sector, focus, origins, scale, level of formality, values, or theoretical perspectives. These function in representation , technical expertise , capacity-building , service delivery  and various social functions . However, it is important to recognize that civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) differ in the degree to which they provide these functions (WB, 2000).

The diversity of places, actors, institutional forms, formality and power CSOs have and the differences in the degree of function provision is very much related to the structure of civil society. Carley et al (2001) identified two types of civil society structure, vertical (formal) and horizontal (informal). The first type is usually formally recognised among the other society forces and functions in the economic (cooperatives, companies limited by guarantee, not for profit organisations), social (trusts, charities, NGOs) and cultural (sport clubs, religious groups, music and cultural clubs) areas. However, the areas of function of formal CSOs intertwine and it is hard to define end boundaries of each area of function to such an extent that the economic based CSOs are considered in some literature to be an extension of the private sector sphere (Carley, et al., 2001).

The informal, or horizontal, structure of civil society has no formally recognised organisational form but is based on the relations of kinship among members of the society (Carley, et al., 2001). This form of civil society is very active especially in the countries of the South and provides all five functions discussed previously. However, (and this applies to this research case study context) this form is specifically active in the area of service provision especially when the formal CSOs are of limited power. This structure of civil society has proven to be well connected with the other two forces in the society, the state and the market, and also the formal structure of civil society, reflecting Jenkins (2007).

Governance as a concept

This review is drawn from (Hasan, Sacha. 2012, Civil Society Participation in Urban Development in Syria).

The dictionary of human geography identified two different uses of the term ‘governance’.  The first is consistent with the nature of organizations as it refers to “the involvement of a wide range of institutions and actors in the production of policy outcomes, including non-governmental organizations, quangos, private companies, pressure groups and social movements as well as the state institutions traditionally regarded as a formal part of the government. Here ‘governance’ is a broader category than ‘government’, with government being one component of governance among many” (Johnston, et al., 2000 pp. 316-317).


The second definition refers to the nature of the organizations’ relationships. Here, governance “refers to a particular form of coordination. In contrast with the top-down control in coordination through hierarchy and the individualized relationship in coordination through markets, governance involves coordination through networks and partnerships” (Johnston, et al., 2000 pp. 316-317).

International agencies, which promote ‘good’ governance (for example: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank), tend to adapt a normative definition which is confined in its focus on economic management issues rather than a more analytically and socially oriented one. Michel Camdessus (IMF managing director), for example, suggested that “good governance is important for countries at all stages of development. . . . Our approach is to concentrate on those aspects of good governance that are most closely related to our surveillance over macroeconomic policies—namely, the transparency of government accounts, the effectiveness of public resource management, and the stability and transparency of the economic and regulatory environment for private sector activity.” (IMF, 1997).

In contrast, UN agencies see good governance from a more socially oriented perspective . The UN defines ‘good governance’ as promoting “equity, participation, pluralism, transparency, accountability and the role of law, in a manner that is effective, efficient and enduring” (UN, 2011a). The UN system promotes good governance through many avenues. For example, The UN Development Programme (UNDP) actively supports national processes of democratic transition.  The programme focuses  on “providing policy advice and technical support and strengthening the capacity of institutions and individuals” by boosting advocacy and communications, public information campaigns and brokering dialogue. It also facilitates ‘knowledge networking’ and the sharing of good practice (UN, 2011a).

It is now widely accepted that “governance is much more than the formal institutions of government. Governance includes the whole range of actors within society, such as community based or grass-roots organizations, NGOs, trade unions, religious organizations and businesses, both formal and informal, alongside the various branches of government and governmental agencies, both national and local” (Devas, 2001 pp. 5-6). Here it is important to note that governance is different from government as it goes beyond governmental organisations to include other actors in society such as civil society and the private sector. Besides, it is more concerned with the nature of the relationships between these actors rather than being limited to the state’s way of managing the country. In recent research, governance is seen as the sphere of relationships between government, actors of civil society and the private sector, also referring to the processes of interaction between these (Carley, et al., 2001 pp. 16-30).

To conclude, ‘governance’ is an evolving and contested concept, which is a healthy issue as it invites the possibility for further development towards a wider definition of it.

Reflections on International Urban Governance Theory and Policy on the Basis of the Syrian Experience

This review is drawn from (Hasan, Sacha. 2012, Civil Society Participation in Urban Development in Syria).

Civil society participation has been used in the countries of the North as a tool to achieve social democracy. However, participation is not a given result to democracy and decentralisation, as despite the shift of many new democracies in the South towards more decentralisation, these have adapted only the minimum of participation models arguing for these to be unrealistic in the process of decision-making. This is, in most of the cases of the countries of the South, is due to the mind-set of the state for being unsure or unwilling to give up the full power over decision-making. Furthermore, the economic realities, resource mobilisation and allocation and the consuming relations within the governance context, and the majority of these are in an informal form in the case of Syria, in the countries of the South are vital to determine the level of influence civil society has over urban development decision-making. Therefore, despite the acknowledgement of Douglass’s argument of the civil society having the competitive power to affect, and sometimes control, urbanisation and further design frameworks for collaboration with other society actors, it is naive to view urban development merely from a normative ‘power-based’ point of view as this fails to fully understand the links between society forces and how these ‘allow’ civil society participation in urban development decision-making.

In this, it is vital to understand that society actors are complex entities, and decentralised decision-making is ideal. Thus, to understand the position of civil society in the urban governance context. This requires an institutional-based analysis of the context where society actors relations and mental models, which have proven to be multi-dimensional and highly complex within a context similar to Syria, and their resulting organisational structures are understood. This is to study the existence and function of civil society participation.

The UN programme for democratic governance and civil society empowerment which is functioning in Syria via UNDP via providing policy advise and technical support on the national level has emphasised civil society participation as a fundamental prerequisite to sustainable development and a key component of good governance. Civil society enabling policies promoted by UNDP has concerned with issues of capacity building for both the state and civil society organisations. This is important yet insufficient to enable civil society participation. The enabling policies have not addressed issues related to the state’s will to enable an institutional space for participation within the urban development legal framework. Furthermore, the enabling policies are providing advice and support only on the national level, while the local level is still trapped in its bureaucratic tradition of rational urban decision-making. This has created a gap in civil society participation understanding between the different levels of the state’s urban development organisations. More importantly, the enabling policies have not acknowledged strategies to deal with the multi-dimensional nature of civil society and its relations with other society actors. This enabling policies shortcomings have kept the policies to be in isolation from the political and institutional aspects of the Syrian urban development context.

In short, it is valid to say that there is a contradiction between the ‘ideal’ civil society participation enabling policies promoted by UN and the reality of the urban development context in the countries of the South. This is because these policies are based on a mere power-based perception of governance, while enabling the space and the function of civil society participation in urban governance is related to the wider political economic and social context and, thus, dependent on the society actors’ mind-set and its resulting organisational relations. This requires the consideration of a more suggestive approach to enable civil society participation in urban development decision-making that considers the institutional context of urban governance in any given context.

The Makings of An Ideal City

Ever since I can remember, I was part of a bustling, heaving, rollicking city. By 2050, over 75 percent of the world will have shared my experience of heaving, bustling, rollicking city, which means that we all have to start assessing our relationship to our surroundings.

What for you makes a good city? It is the everything-in-its place kind? Or the more organic, meandering, man-made version? Perhaps it's somewhere in the middle. Urbanized does provoke many questions and the only answers lie in getting involved in our community to help make a city we do wish to see.

This is taken from the link below. Click the link to read the whole article.
http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/node/64676?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SustainableCitiesCollective-TwitterHandleFeed+%28Sustainable+Cities+Collective+-+Twitter+Handle+Feed%29

Data Driven City, Cairo / Egypt by Mekano Studio

Second Prize Winner at the competition which is an initiative that argues the people to take their own decisions and to leave the 5% of the lands in egypt and go to live in the 95% lands of Egypt, with a theme of , Taking Leave

To read more, the original article in available on http://architecturelab.net/2012/06/data-driven-city-cairo-egypt-by-mekano-studio/#!prettyPhoto

Collective City

The Starting Point of the new Egyptian Dream is a Collective City that holds all the required and nessesary fields of living, the starting point has to get every single person to it, it has to collect and gather all the people around it, the new city has to be a colllective one, it has to be open to all of the egyptians who hopes for a chance of life, the collective holds the power, agriculture,technological,political, tourism and economics.

How Social Media Inspires Global Development

This article originally published at International Journalists' Network here.

Local stories told through social media help drive global discussions on issues like sustainable development and climate change.

This was the main message from a recent panel titled “Local Climate, Global Change” held during the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington.

Panelists exchanged insights on communications and development journalism around Connect4Climate, a global campaign on climate change that runs a video contest for African youth.

“We should stop calling social media ‘social media’ but ‘media’ as all media will soon be inherently social,” said Rami Khater, Al Jazeera’s senior new media producer. “Information on development can now be found at the local level to drive global discussions and create change.”

Here are some practices and tools shared during the discussion:

• “The Stream,” a daily TV show Khater produces on Al Jazeera, gives voice to members of its vibrant global social media community. People connect through online channels like Google Hangout to ask questions and raise concerns on public issues to a global audience. Khater says this empowers the “voiceless” to tell their stories effectively for real impact.
• The Third Pole Project of ChinaDialogue and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) harnesses citizen journalism to raise awareness of environmental issues in the Himalayan region. The project brings together a team of reporters to write about climate change in Asia and engage on social media and provides mobile phones to women in remote Himalayan villages to tell stories in their own words. “When reporters are asked to tell complex, local stories with global effectiveness, we developed this model to integrate all kinds of social media onto a platform where journalists, NGOs, academics and policymakers discuss sustainable development,” said Joydeep Gupta, the project’s director.
• Microsoft’s Local Impact Map is another tool journalists can use to find local data and stories on development. The online interactive map collects and shares stories told by local organizations and citizens worldwide, and shows the impact technologies have on development at the local level. Tara Grumm, Microsoft’s senior marketing manager, said it enables other organizations to create their own local impact maps.
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Participation and Power

This review is drawn from (Hasan, Sacha. 2012, Civil Society Participation in Urban Development in Syria).

The concept ‘power’ and its analysis has been a topic of debate in social sciences since the 1960s. The debate became further complicated when ‘power’ was associated with ‘participation’ and the concept ‘empowerment’ was introduced. This is due to the idea that ‘participation’ provides ‘power’ to the powerless and enables them to realize their potential (Nelson, et al., 1995). Power is described as “access to resources, control of the elements and processes of production, and rights to dispose of products are experienced in face to face relations” within a wider and systematic economic relations. “How people stand in relation to each other in these systems is described as power”. Therefore, “power is a description of relations, not a ‘thing’ which people have” (Nelson, et al., 1995 pp. 7-8).

Literature introduced three models of power – power to; power over; and power through (Jenkins, 2007; Nelson, et al., 1995). The model ‘power to’ suggests that “power can grow infinitely if you work at it, and growth of one person does not necessarily negatively affect another” (Nelson, et al., 1995 p. 8). Thus, power is a generative and transformative personal attribute which can be developed via capacity and knowledge building within social relations, where people undergo and exercise power (Hartsock, 1990). However, empowerment in this is understood as a “multi-dimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives. It is a process that fosters power in people for use in their own lives, their communities and in their society, by acting on issues they define as important” (Page, et al., 1999).

In contrast to the expression of growth used in ‘power to’ model, ‘power over’ involves “gaining access to ‘political’ decision-making, often in public forums” where power is a ‘thing’ of “a finite amount in a closed system”. In this, gaining power would be at the expense of others. (Jenkins, 2007; Nelson, et al., 1995). Power in this was found in observable conflicts where one party dominated the other and made them do “what they would not otherwise have done” (Dahl, 1961; Polsby, 1963; Nelson, et al., 1995 p. 9). Another image to express power in this model was found in invisible conflicts where “one party established barriers which prevented others from voicing their interests, let alone getting them on the agenda” (Bachrach, et al., 1970; Nelson, et al., 1995 p. 9). A third image of power in this model was to give the dominant party interests a “god-given” nature where no alternative to the situation quo was possible (Lukes, 1974; Nelson, et al., 1995). ‘Power over’, therefore, expressed power to be coercive and centred in the governmental institutions. In this, empowerment happens when power is taken from one party to be given to another – i.e. the sum of power is always a “zero sum” (Jenkins, 2007; Nelson, et al., 1995).

The third model of power is ‘power through’. This refused the idea of power as a subject that can be possessed and exercised by any party considered ‘powerful’ (Ferguson, 1990). Alternatively, power in this model is a “subjectless” element “consisting of discourse, institutions, actors and a flow of events. These interact invisibly with a logic that is only apparent afterwards, to draw or tie in more and more relations within the ambit of the state” (Nelson, et al., 1995 p. 10). This model, therefore, suggests that systems work through a process of struggle which runs through a system of events and has startingly unexpected outcomes (Nelson, et al., 1995 p. 10).

Empowerment in this model depends on two things, power changes; and power expands, but “always involves forms of dominance and subjection, albeit often accepted and sometimes negotiated” (Jenkins, 2007). In this, empowerment is the aim to find “more spaces of control” via changing attitudes and behaviour to alter power differentials in relationships (Giddens, 1984; Nelson, et al., 1995). Nonetheless, there is no end definition for the concept, as empowerment is a “construct shared by many disciplines and arenas, and how empowerment is understood varies among these perspectives (Page, et al., 1999). Rapport (1984) noted that empowerment is easy to define by its absence but difficult to define in action, as it takes different forms in different contexts (Rapport, 1984).

In this, three attitudes to ‘empower’ can be identified. The first “does not entail necessary conflict and can be promoted in a top-down manner”. The second, however, always involves conflict and ”can only be effective if derived from a bottom-up initiative”. The third attitude requires “understanding the prevalent power relations and how these can – and should – change” (Jenkins, 2007). This understanding of empowerment, however, raises an essential question of “how can empowerment be initiated by those who have ‘power over’ others when “any notion of empowerment being given by one group to another hides an attempt to keep control?” (Rowlands, 1992 p. 52). In this, the potentially bottom-up concept of empowerment can be used to perpetuate and disguise continued top-down attitudes and approaches to gain control (Rowlands, 1992; Nelson, et al., 1995). Thus, this research attempted to analyse power relations within the Syrian context in order to highlight the possibilities for civil society empowerment for a more efficient participation process to take place.