Citizenship by Consternation? Normative Democracy Orientations within the Context of Public Participation in Urban Planning in Germany and Switzerland

• Applicant: Dr. Chantal Magnin
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 242661592

In cities, ever more often municipal authorities, but also private planning offices and investors organize participative processes. New and direct forms of public participation are playing an increasing role in urban planning. These include workshops on future development and other events, in which citizens may present their requests. Those discussion forums address different expectations of the citizens to obtain a more direct influence on the planning and the shaping of the public space, which is more and more contested by different social groups. The new forms of participation in larger urban projects are representing a focal point for different normative ideas of participation and democracy. Therefore, this research project will use them as a starting point for the analysis of changing concepts of the citizen and the political order.The research project asks how municipal authorities address the citizens to participate and which role is attributed to them by the institutional frame of the process. Besides, the aim of this research is to generate a typology of different cultural patterns on the side of the participating citizens concerning democracy, the forming of the political will and the political order in the context of a changing political decision making process in the city. The results of the project can thus contribute to a deeper sociological and cultural understanding of the structural changes in politics. Comparing cities in the two countries Germany and Switzerland should help to identify the influence of different models of democracy and their respective institutional conditions. Furthermore the comparison allows reconstructing the differences in traditional beliefs about democracy and freedom, considering the aspect of an increasing role of the city, its rapid changes and its search of new ways for solving problems adequately. Patterns of interpretation and moral concepts of the participating citizens are elements of a changing political culture. Therefore, non-standardized interviews will be conducted with citizens involved in selected urban projects where direct forms of participation are used. The way in which the municipal authorities and the institutional settings address the citizens will be analyzed based on appropriate documents of urban administration. We will choose forms of participation in urban projects that are very important for the development of a city and where possible integration or exclusion processes with regard to the future uses of the space are becoming apparent in the planning process.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants