How Planners Design Public Participation

Abstract

Although public participation is a ubiquitous and legally required feature in urban planning, members of the public, elected officials, and planners express dissatisfaction with its process and outcomes. This study used critical incident interviews with planners who influence participation processes to investigate the factors that affect their choices in participation design and implementation. Based on analysis of 49 practice stories of “success” or “lack of success,” this study finds that public participation design (a) is a group process that (b) extends over time and (c) is shaped and constrained by institutional factors. There is wide variation in the degree of control planners have over the participation process. The study confirmed all of the factors in the literature, emphasizing the importance of the intention of the sponsor, the attitude and skills of the planner, and material resources. The study identified new factors, including the defined decision space, the type of plan, other planner assessment of the needs of the situation, in-the-moment-issues, and project team demographics. Unexpected findings included the ubiquity of race and other equity issues in planners’ stories of public participation as well as the presence and impact of participant protests that disrupted the planning process. Because participation design is a group process embedded in a particular context, improving participation is a systemic problem. Helping individual planners to develop better skills or more pro-social motivations can improve participation marginally, but it will take systemic change of the conditions supporting participation to make a significant difference in outcomes.