Key points
- Forester: the planner's everyday decisions, schedules, reports, agendas, exclude without needing to prohibit.
- Irazábal showed in Curitiba and Portland that participation favoured the middle classes and left peripheries out.
- Inclusion means decision-making power and budget in neighbourhoods, not the number of meetings held.
Inclusive citizen participation is the kind that ensures decisions about the city are also taken by those who are usually left out: residents of poor neighbourhoods, migrants, women with care burdens, young people, those without time or trust in institutions. Two authors have studied in detail what makes it possible and what blocks it. John Forester, professor of planning at Cornell University, spent four decades analysing how planners negotiate, listen and mediate in situations of unequal power. Clara Irazábal, a Venezuelan planner, studied how Latin American and Latino communities in the United States participate, and are often excluded, in the making of their cities.
John Forester: planning in the face of power and facilitating deliberation
Forester starts from a practical observation: planning always takes place in the face of power, and whoever plans decides every day whom to inform, whom to listen to and what to put on the agenda. In Planning in the Face of Power (1989) he shows that those everyday, apparently technical decisions shape participation as much as laws do: a meeting called during working hours, an unreadable report or a consultation once the project is already designed exclude without needing to prohibit. In The Deliberative Practitioner (1999) he proposes the alternative: a planner who facilitates deliberation, learns from people's stories and treats conflict as a source of information rather than an obstacle.
Mediation in urban disputes: possibilities and limits
Forester's most practical contribution is his study of mediation in urban disputes. He documents cases in which assisted negotiation among residents, developers and administration produced better agreements than any party could have imposed, and also the limits of that method when power inequality is extreme. His lesson is that effective participation does not consist in voting among closed options but in jointly building the problem and the alternatives, with time, shared information and recognition of the emotions and histories each party brings.
Clara Irazábal: participation and exclusion in the Americas
Irazábal brings the view from the South and from the diaspora. In City Making and Urban Governance in the Americas (2005) she compared Curitiba and Portland, two cities celebrated for their planning, and showed that their participatory processes favoured organised middle classes while poor peripheries were left aside. In Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events (2008) she studied how Latin American public spaces become stages of citizenship when movements occupy them, and in her work on Latino communities in Los Angeles she documented a participation that happens outside official channels, in churches, associations and markets, because the official ones do not recognise them.
Obstacles and conditions for inclusive urban governance
Both authors agree on the obstacles. Formal participation reproduces inequality unless it actively corrects who can attend, understand and speak. Capture by organised elites, co-optation of community leaders and consultation as a box-ticking exercise empty the process. And the distrust accumulated after broken promises keeps many communities away, which is then used as proof that they are not interested. Irazábal adds the dimension of citizenship: those without papers or without command of the official language participate in fear or not at all, and the city is planned without them even though they build it.
The conditions for inclusive urban governance follow from those critiques: take participation to neighbourhoods and their schedules, with translation, childcare and transport; recognise and fund the organisations that already exist instead of creating parallel channels; give decision-making power and budget, not only voice; facilitate with mediators trained in Forester's sense; and measure inclusion by who was present and what changed, not by how many meetings were held. A city that does so does not eliminate conflict, but it turns it into decisions its inhabitants recognise as their own.
Frequently asked questions
What does John Forester propose in The Deliberative Practitioner?
A planner who facilitates deliberation among unequal parties, learns from people's stories, treats conflict as a source of information and uses mediation to build agreements better than any party could impose.
What did Clara Irazábal show about Curitiba and Portland?
That two cities celebrated for their planning developed participatory processes that favoured organised middle classes while poor peripheries were left aside, so that their reputation for participation concealed an exclusion.
