Which of the following is not an example of citizen participation in public administration?

‘Citizen participation’ refers to citizen involvement in public decision making. In different interpretations, ‘citizens’ may be either individuals or organized communities, and ‘participation’ may involve either observation or power. The phrase ‘citizen participation’ came into use to denote remedial efforts to involve inactive citizens or clients in government activity, but it can include autonomous citizen activities in the larger society, such as locality or community development, social planning, and social action. Arguments for citizen participation variously emphasize benefits to individuals, communities, organizations, and the society, including increased knowledge, authority, power, and problem-solving ability. The purposes of citizen participation include communicating information, developing relationships, developing the capacity to act, and preserving or changing conditions. Citizens can exercise different amounts of power in engaging in these purposes. The means of citizen participation include groups and formal organizations, meetings, inquiries, action, and technical assistance. When ‘citizen participation’ refers to communities, participation poses questions of representation. Some citizens, particularly the better educated and wealthier, generally have greater ability to participate than others. There are examples of citizen participation that has accomplished its purposes and solved problems, but empirical data are sketchy, and no systematic evaluation of citizen participation is possible at this time.

Conclusion

Citizen participation in making public decisions that affect their individual and collective interests is a basic component of citizenship. However, public organizations may actively or inadvertently discourage citizen involvement, and citizens vary considerably in confidence that they have the political and intellectual authority to take part. As a result, those with higher income and education participate most commonly, and middle-class and white citizens are generally more active than lower income and racial or ethnic minority citizens. Thus, participants often do not represent a wide range of groups, interests, or perspectives, and higher income participants typically exercise more power over decisions than do lower income participants. Hence, deliberate effort is necessary to recruit participants and design processes to create decision making that is broadly representative, in which participants exercise similar power, and where participants act on shared, useful knowledge. Community organizing can draw public officials' and professionals' attention to these challenges and encourage them to address them.

See also:

Citizen Participation; Citizenship: Political; Citizenship: Sociological Aspects; Civic Culture; Civil Society, Concept and History of; Civil Society/Public Sphere, History of the Concept; Democracy; Democracy, History of; Democratic Theory; Freedom/Liberty: Impact on the Social Sciences; Freedom: Political; French Revolution, The; Human Rights, History of; Liberalism: Historical Aspects; Marshall, Thomas Humphrey (1893–1981); Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History; Rights; State, History of

10.14 Superation of citizen participation topics

When the term “citizen participation” appears, which is in fact what we are talking about applied to the role of the citizen in urban infrastructures in the world of smart cities, and beyond the positive connotations (citizen involvement), there is also a nebula of doubts like what will be the real value of the contributions received, if this will slow the project, if the expense in money and people will be worth it, etc. … In part they are caused by the denostation and wear of the term “citizen participation” certainly outdated and linked to obsolete partial strategies, out-of-date and very academic, which have costly intertwined with the effectiveness of government management, except in specific cases of success.

Citizen participation linked to open government and smart-city strategies has little to do with isolated and ancient citizen participation, which is why the term should be updated. The academy has not yet been able to find the update, but “citizen involvement” is a term that better reflects the current moment of the citizen’s role in public (and private) governance. These negative clichés of a misunderstood citizen participation must be overcome, and the reality has overcome them:

“People do not participate”: When a public institution opens a participation process or conducts a citizen consultation, the levels of participation are low compared to the participation, for example, in a normal kind of election. Mistake here is to make this comparison, the right and importance we all have to the electoral participation is not the same, choosing our governments and/or public representatives, in comparison with participation in a specific city theme.

It is clear that people will only participate in what interests them, if not they will not do. Only affected citizens will participate, for example, in a participatory process or popular consultation on the renovation of a square or a street, only, for example, its inhabitants or at most the people who use it. In addition, maybe the subject attracts some professionals or fans of urbanism or of environment, but nothing more. Therefore the turnout will be low compared to traditional election appointments. In addition, the root mistake is to confuse quantity with quality, quantity, being a value, is not so important in participatory processes, but quality yes, the conclusions drawn from it. It is much more important to draw three or four well-worked conclusions that can influence or improve a particular project, than if 50 or 2,000 people have participated in the meetings.

“Citizen participation paralyzes and slows down”: The process of citizen participation may require extra time in the project, of course, but the wealth, social peace, and symbiosis of the citizens with the project are well worth it. In this chapter we have seen how some projects had to be stopped, turned back, and started again, this time with the involvement of citizens, but now with the consequent waste of time and economic overhead.

“Dedication to these topics distracts from other important parts of the project”: It is all about assessing whether or not citizen knowledge is important and what can bring to the project. In this chapter we have argued how important it is.

“It is impossible to answer all citizens”: The process of citizen response is fundamental, there is nothing more discouraging for a citizen who has spent an X time he does not have, than to receive absolutely no feedback from anyone where he has contributed his ideas and which may have influenced the project. If we never answer we will not have this citizen motivated never more.

Internal citizen response processes are perfectly manageable by structure, first because they are not massive, second because we can use artificial intelligence processes to help answer them, and thirdly because if we do analysis internally of dedications and needs, we will quickly find the formula, workers, and spaces to meet this need, which is far more important than most of the bureaucratic processes to which a large number of workers are dedicated.

“It is a fashion”: To despise citizen knowledge is a recklessness and a luxury that we cannot afford. The times when four people decided everything in an office without having the general knowledge and the knowledge that citizens and workers can bring, have passed to better time.

When universal suffrage did not exist, the reasons given were that the people were not ready to voice opinions. We will now be in a second phase of this, will we despise citizens and their knowledge because we consider that they are not ready to do anything?

“Transparency goes against the right to privacy”: In first term, the right to privacy is guaranteed by the same laws of transparency, and for example, as we enter in the world of open data, we move in parallel, and hand in hand in the world of data protection. Not to consider the side effects of a necessary reform we must stop doing it, that is, by protecting ourselves and minimizing them.

“It is a way of removing the obligation to decide”: Nothing farther from the truth, opening up to citizens does not forget, but legitimizes the decision process that continues to be in hands of people we have chosen to do it or who that leads the company in private sector, but they will do so in a richer way, counting and integrating the entire team.

Mobile and Social Media

Citizen participation and wider information dissemination has been significantly influenced by the proliferation and use of consumer devices. Of all devices or interfaces, mobile phone and in particular smartphone and communications technology continues to act as a catalyst of change in the digital world.

Most devices today are location enabled, having sensors by which a user’s location can be known, and as ICT technologies are pushed out onto such devices such as apps, the utilisation of location-based services (LBS) and technologies will inevitably increase both in terms of prevalence and use. In effect, such technologies become ‘embedded’ or invisible to the end-user. Combined with social media applications such as Twitter,11 users play a significant role in how such devices report and record information, and to date the proliferation of mobiles in society has afforded their use in critical areas such as in disaster and crisis management, where citizen information and photography are posted and ‘consumed’ by authorities tasked with emergency responses. While in many developing nations smartphones lag behind, the use of lower tech feature phones have proven to bring substantive benefits to end-users, as for example in areas such as banking.

A by-product of spatially enabled phones is that of pervasive location tracking. While telecommunications providers need to know our whereabouts to provide service, many of us broadcast our location information, often inadvertently via apps installed on our phones. Everything we do is recorded, collected and collated, and is most certainly a significant area of interest to commercial and other agencies, whereby historical and indeed real-time information and positioning of the user can be utilised for a myriad of uses, from crime investigations to simply real-time tracking and viewing of a person’s location, anytime, anywhere in the world, albeit raising ever more questions surrounding personal privacy.

Abstract

Active citizen participation in urban decision-making processes has proven to be of great value for better aligning population needs with urban planning proposals. However, in many cases, citizens frequently fail to actively participate in these planning processes. The emergence on the political agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular “Objective 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities,” offers urban planners the opportunity to reflect upon current strategies and tools to achieve more participatory and inclusive processes. In order to take a step forward in this direction, this chapter studies the potential of five location-based social networks—Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Strava, and MapMyRun—to inform and improve urban planning processes. Within the context of smart cities, the main objective of this work is to present the advantages of incorporating the user-generated information offered by these sources into decision-making processes to encourage smarter, participatory, and inclusive urban planning and management.

2 Background: role of citizens in smart cities

The concept of citizen participation is not exclusive to smart cities, but smart cities have shed a new light on this concept and provide new means to enable this participation. This section positions citizen participation and its impact in different research fields.

Smart cities are currently benefiting from a positive buzz from supporting organizations and thus from a lot of economic support. Taking advantage of this support and the multitude of technological possibilities, cities must devise smart city projects, decide how they will use and advance their ICT infrastructure, and optimally exploit their assets. A key challenge is to carry out these actions in coordination with the citizens because the ultimate goal of building a smart city is to improve their quality of life. Hollands (2008) underlines the importance of citizens and critiques the technological focus of smart cities. He also claims that smart cities must be based on something more than the use of ICT if they want to enable social, environmental, economic, and cultural development. The real smart city, according to Hollands, should start from the people and human capital of the city and use IT to favor democratic debates about the kind of city people want to live in. This radical critique led to a new stream in the scientific literature. A new definition of a smart city integrated the various dimensions of a smart city and the critique (Caragliu et al., 2011, p. 70): A city can be defined as “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance. This definition is widely accepted and used in scientific literature and in practice (e.g., smart cities such as Amsterdam used this definition as a basis for their strategy). Fig. 4.2 represents these two conflicting views between top-down (with the focus on technology) and bottom-up (with the focus on citizen participation) approaches.

Even though the traditional definitions of smart cities take the specific role of citizens in a smart city into account through the “participatory governance” or the “human capital” dimension (Albino et al., 2015), the input they can provide and how it can be gathered need further research. In their integrative framework, Gil-Garcia et al., n.d. attempt to conceptualize smartness in government. They state that fostering collaboration between citizens and governments is an essential dimension of smart government. Scientific literature acknowledges the essential role of citizens in smart cities and argues that the notion of empowerment of citizens and “democratization” of innovation should be added to this definition (Perera et al., 2014; Schaffers et al., 2011). The citizens must be able to identify priorities, strategies, and goals for the smart city strategy and should be considered as actors at the center of the implementation and benefits of smart city projects (Albino et al., 2015; Nam and Pardo, 2011).

However, despite this crucial role for citizens, a holistic view on the different participation methods with concrete examples is still rare in scientific literature. Based on our observation in practical cases, this leads to the risk that “citizen participation” remains an abstract buzzword instead of an essential element of the strategy of a city aiming for the label “smart.” In this context, this chapter aims at identifying the different methods of citizen participation in a smart city. Furthermore, it builds on previous research on the matter to present a framework to manage this participation (Simonofski et al., 2017).

Policy/Legislation

Stakeholder involvement and citizen participation practices in transport planning vary across European countries and between cities. Several countries have formal, mandatory consultation procedures for medium- and large-scale transport projects, as well as for developing transport plans and SUMPs. Local Transport Plans, for example, which English local authorities are legally obliged to develop, require participation but have no prescribed procedure for the participation process. In France, there is a clear legal framework for the development of urban mobility plans (Plan de Déplacement Urbains), and for the involvement of institutional stakeholders; but it is not very demanding in terms of citizen involvement. In contrast to that, in Flanders, Belgium, law requires that citizens are involved in all local planning activities. A range of Belgian cities have gone beyond the required consultation procedures and developed new participation approaches and routines.

21.4.14 Cocreation spaces

Cocreation spaces are a technique for managing knowledge and citizen participation that act precisely in the line of ordering and managing the internalization of this citizen knowledge. They are usually web spaces, in which a project, idea, or question is explained in a pedagogical way. Citizens can post solutions or contributions they consider appropriate with the support of documents, videos, or any other plugin they deem appropriate.

Over time and technological advancement, cocreation spaces have acquired more possibility of interaction between participants, increasing the aforementioned effects of collective intelligence by creating synergies and exchanges of information.

It makes perfect sense to generate cocreation spaces in the design of Smart Cities and especially when it is applied to some specific projects.

Dismantling the ‘Ordered’ Landscape

One significant roadblock that anarchist geographers see to greater citizen participation in innovative planning and urban design are regulations and laws pertaining to the use of space. They argue that these are often unrelated to people's needs and are solely there to support particular power relationships and uneven development. Anarchist geography thus challenges overt efforts to manipulate behavior or deny free access to space through design, while also disputing the practice of ‘master planning’ and all efforts to divide space into neat categories or impose overly determined restrictions on use. Many geographers have pointed to the basis in fear of spatial policies designed to contain perceived disorder (e.g., the Haussmanization of Paris that replaced thousands of working-class neighborhoods with wide boulevards or the spatial fortressing policies that restrict the mobility of the homeless today). Anarchist geographers move beyond this critique to argue forcibly against all forms of planning that utilize spatial codes for the purposes of social control or the containment of diverse life styles.

David Sibley's studies of the urban gypsies in Hull, England provide one example of how planned spaces can contain embedded and false assumptions about people and social structures, thus inhibiting free association. He describes how planners have attempted to use restrictive classifications of space to control and alter the activities of nonconforming groups. Sibley believes that such efforts to homogenize and ‘purify’ space through the precise assignment of its use violates the rights of people to survive through the integration of activities in space (e.g., living and working). Rather than support culturally diverse dwellers in their efforts to enhance autonomy and self-sufficiency, he argues that planners tend to define these groups as ‘deviant’. Sibley also suggests that much of the mathematical spatial modeling that went on in geography in the mid-twentieth century – Central Place theory and the geometry of Walter Christaller, for example – was an effort to bring order to a disorderly physical world while building the power and prestige of its practitioners. Critics of earlier Garden City or New Town movements as well as more recent critics of the New Urbanism draw heavily upon this opposition to order for order's sake and the stifling of creative expression through over regulation of the uses and appearances of public and private space.