Participation in Urban Contention and Deliberation

Participation is a popular buzzword in contemporary urban studies. For some, it implies a deepening of democratic deliberation; for others, it represents grassroots resistance to powerful elites and neoliberalization. Rather than seeing participation as either consensus-building or conflicts of interest, as either a top-town or bottom-up process, the evidence suggests that it can be all of these. By adopting a more dynamic, pragmatic and empirically informed perspective, seemingly opposite normative conceptions of democratic participation may be theorized as different ‘moments’ in the democratic process. Bottom-up mobilization may coincide with and complement top-down initiatives, each dominating different political phases of policy making, implementation and monitoring. Instead of forcing Habermas and Foucault into the same frame, we maintain that different conceptions of participatory democracy apply to varying degrees at distinct moments or stages of the political process. The specific context in which participation takes place also shapes the democratic process. The paper presents case studies from Belfast, Berlin, Durban, Philadelphia and Sao Paulo to illustrate the approach and provides insight into the urban as a social laboratory in which other scales of social life and multiple ways to perform democracy are constructed. Some of these cities were historically divided – sometimes by concrete walls – along sectarian, racial, and political lines or by extreme income inequality. These boundaries make deliberation and consensus-building difficult. Some of the cities have a longstanding tradition of citizen participation, while in others, people were passive and withdrawn. Some benefit from relatively generous welfare states, while others struggle for democracy. Depending on the specific historical and institutional context, local participation and civic engagement can break down social differences or reinforce them. The cases from middle-income democratizing countries provide grounds for optimism, while more sceptical positions are taken with respect to the two post-industrial cities in the US and Germany, with Northern Ireland in between.