Digital Citizen Participation in a Comparative Context: Co-Creating Cities through Hybrid Practices

In Francesco Rotondo, Aleksandra Djukic, Preben Hansen, Edmond Manahasa, Mastoureh Fathi & Juan A. García-Esparza (eds.), Placemaking in Practice Volume 2: Engagement in Placemaking: Methods, Strategies, Approaches. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. pp. 156–180 (2024)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Citizen participation today needs to be understood as both an empowerment practice to create urban futures as well as the perpetuation of entrepreneurial and neoliberal modes of planning. The exponential progress of technologies and the digitalisation of everyday life have led to a surge of innovation. Since hybridity has become a key factor, citizen participation now involves citizens and governments meeting online and offline in a multi-stakeholder setting to plan the city in parallel layers, often according to controversial or even contradictory logic (Horelli et al., 2015). As digital citizen participation opens up new tools and means to mobilise people and shape urban futures, this chapter analyses these new aspects through the categories of top-down/bottom-up participation as well as formal/informal practices. Using four case studies comparatively, our aim with this chapter is to find a new theoretical basis and contextualisation for digital citizen participation. The case studies are situated across Europe and North America: we study participatory budgeting in Helsinki, digitalising citizen participation in Lubbock, Texas, the National Map of Security Threats in Poland, and digital placemaking by a grassroots movement in an urban planning participation process in Zürich, Switzerland. The findings of the article show that (1) digital citizen participation fosters novel multi-actor networks negotiating governance of the urban space, (2) studies of citizen participation need to acknowledge the multi-layered hybridity and (3) new modes of governance enable novel senses of informality in participation.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Role of electronic participation in the formation of civil society.Anastaiya Kostyantinivna Konstantinivska - 2019 - Epistemological studies in Philosophy, Social and Political Sciences 2 (1):79-85.
Accountability and Citizen Participation.Jenny M. Lewis & Bodil Damgaard - 2014 - In Mark Bovens, Robert E. Goodin & Thomas Schillemans (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability. Oxford University Press.
Technology on trial: public participation in decision-making related to science and technology.K. Guild Nichols - 1979 - [Washington, D.C.: sold by OECD Publications and Information Center].

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-12-27

Downloads
99 (#214,821)

6 months
99 (#61,251)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Asma Mehan
Texas Tech University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations