Communities shaping their built environment - Part 3: Building relationships and trust through parti

Across the world, we’ve seen some controversial infrastructure development, with strong grassroots opposition often gathering around a local identity. The HS2 railway in the UK, the Keystone pipeline in the US, or the high-speed train in the Susa valley in Italy are examples. Could participatory planning prevent or mitigate such conflicts? Could it also be misused to legitimise truly harmful developments?

Dr Nader Naderpajouh: These are great examples and I can add more. Stuttgart 21 is supposed to make Stuttgart a major train hub in Europe. It was strongly opposed, to the point that it became the agenda of political parties, and the means of a political power struggle. The Bujagali Dam in Uganda, and its impact on the indigenous community, is another example. We cannot eliminate social opposition through participatory planning, but we can definitely address it in a more engaged way, by involving the communities in the decision-making process. And it can be misused. We are living in a time of ‘alternative facts’, and as such, manipulation is happening in the political sphere and it can easily happen in projects as well. There is the risk that some stakeholders lead people by ‘alternative facts’ rather than actual and technical facts. If there is a majority pushing for some agenda, the other theoretical danger is the use of participatory planning to suppress the voice of minorities.

Alison Whitten: Where there are strong proponents for a project, they are obviously motivated to see that project succeed. There are situations where feedback is cherry-picked, or some voices are intentionally not heard as part of the process. This is not how we would describe good participatory planning practice. One thing that happens, and is very difficult to overcome, is that we often start with a solution. We start with the assumption that we need an oil pipeline or a new road, without questioning the problem that we're trying to solve. If we were to ask the community about their underlying need, we might see a range of options emerge. You might find that you don't need that oil pipeline, for example, you should look to other sources of energy for a long-term solution. Or you may not need to build a new road if a more sustainable solution is possible. It can become very political and it is often tied to a range of very powerful interests. But if we try to go back to those first-principles set of questions more often, we will end up with better outcomes over time.

NN: Interestingly, the decision at the end is often still political, rather than coming from the community. In the Keystone pipeline, the decision was reversed after the 2020 US election. The project’s cancellation was requested by the community, but maybe unfortunately, the final decision needed that political will. Some scholars refer to this issue as a crisis within participatory planning, saying that some political groups will find their identities and politicise the whole movement. This is the case in projects like Keystone. They are projects that are supposed to involve a large number of stakeholders and communities. But they become politicised to the point that social, technical, and economic issues are overridden by political will.

Globally, we have seen a variety of different control and mitigation policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen how important public trust and understanding are for those measure to be accepted and effective. Is there anything that we might learn from this experience and bring into the practice of planning? Which elements of urban resilience and social cohesion are most important to recovery, and which will allow us to be prepared for whatever the next crisis might be?

NN: This question refers to the key message of our report: to build community resilience, we need the built environment and the infrastructure, but we also need social capital. Participatory planning can address this, as it can build social capital and trust, and create more balanced power relations in the development process.

Since we refer to COVID-19, I want to compare a few countries that have responded differently to the pandemic. We have countries that didn't control the virus very well and the result was catastrophic. Then some countries like Australia controlled it very well but did so through a very top-down approach that did not enable people to take part in decisions. In contrast, countries like Finland have done it in a more balanced way. They had some restrictions, but it was a bottom-up approach, giving responsibility to people and communities. Coming back to the lessons learned for infrastructure and housing developments, involving more actors within decisions increases their technical knowledge and their responsiveness. This is because it empowers them and gives them more responsibility. If we get another wave of infection, the community that is empowered may be more resilient because they were involved in the decision process and they have assumed responsibility. Of course, this is not always possible, but it is an ideal situation.

AW: COVID-19 has really demonstrated the need for resilience-building measures like those we have been testing through the Resilient Communities program. COVID-19 shows exactly why it's important, fundamentally, to know your neighbours. I know multiple times that I relied on my neighbours to pick up groceries for my family while I was at home waiting for COVID-19 test results. To that end, the built environment is a facilitator for community. Built form can enable or discourage social interaction depending on how it's designed. To some extent, you can achieve better outcomes just by knowing the right formula to build. But you're not going to maximise your positive community connections and your social cohesion without that trust-building component, without encouraging people to get to know one another. A participatory process in design, development and use makes a big difference to trust building within a community. It’s very locally driven, but I think it is scalable in the sense that it's replicable across different communities, and it doesn't have to be the same model everywhere. It's a time-consuming and resourcing-intensive process, but it must be, because building trust and social capital needs time and resources. It's not an easy task to do, but it is very important.

Sometimes participatory planning can be viewed as having an end to it, so it's done to inform one phase of a project. But recognising it as part of the whole experience and part of building trusted connections helps to create greater support for it. It’s important to recognise the importance of investing in it up front, rather than as a tokenistic thing later. That's certainly going to be important following COVID-19, as we rebuild trust in governments at all scales and start to emerge from the pandemic and into the public realm. It's going to be important to maintain that trust, so the more that we can look for community voices to help guide decisions, the better.

NN: I just want to add a simple comment from one of our interviewees that's always stayed with me. For a long time, they had been in the process of planning and building a home. At that time, the interviewee said that they did not have this home yet, but they had a community. When I present this to people, some shrug it off and suggest, I would prefer having a new home as soon as possible. But as Alison was saying, when we think specially about the times of COVID-19, we realise that having a community is very important. We need to consider the balance between the social capital and built environment capital.