Participatory planning

Participatory planning is an urban planning paradigm that emphasizes involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural. It is often considered as part of community development. Participatory planning aims to harmonize views among all of its participants as well as prevent conflict between opposing parties. In addition, marginalized groups have an opportunity to participate in the planning process.

Responding to the gap between the desires of local communities, and government programs such as urban renewal, Sherry Arnstein wrote A Ladder of Citizen Participation to "encourage a more enlightened dialogue". She developed the ladder as a typology, with eight rungs ranging from various degrees of nonparticipation, to degrees of tokenism, and ultimately, citizen power. Her critical assault on planning methods of the time has informed policies affecting the growth and change in participatory methods, broadening access to planning processes.

A 1971 U.S. Department of Transportation publication summarized seminars where professional planners, public administrators, and citizens debated the idea of participatory planning. The U.S. Department of Transportation recognized that citizens felt excluded from the current planning processes. In the seminar the following questions were asked: “Why do you want citizens to participate? What kind of citizens should be included? When should citizen participation enter the planning process? How do you organize citizen participation? How much power should be invested in citizen participation groups? Where do local elected officials fit in the citizen participation element? What are the responsibilities of the planner regarding citizen participation?”. The consensus was that citizen participation is valuable for better planning as well as for minimizing confrontation; however, not everyone agreed on how to effectively involve citizens.

Planning needed a structure to allow natural and meaningful input from citizens. In order for this to happen, planning needed to move away from its hierarchical model and move toward a reticular model. The reticular model would allow for more citizen participation. While there is some demand for a top-down approach with centralized decision-making from experts, participatory planning uses a bottom-up approach. Participatory planning aims to add more participation in decision-making, increase the legitimacy of politicians and officials, and provide for more criticism of experts’ plans. The standard approach to planning can be defined in the following quote:

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