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.

Community Participation and the Role of the Planner

By Sacha Hasan

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.