TIRONI Distributing Obligations Performing Publ

Author's personal copy
Qualitative Sociology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-019-9407-5
Distributing Obligations, Performing Publics: Responsible

Citizens in Post-Disaster Engagement
Juan Lama 1 & Manuel Tironi 1,2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract
In public discourse and much sociological research disasters are understood as critical
situations in which the engagement of citizens is critical to rebuild the political, material and
social texture sustaining everyday life. However, it remains unclear how post-disaster partic-
ipatory techniques help in the modulation of certain types of citizens. In this article we ask: Do
disasters, as a specific setting of participation, qualify or specify how citizenship is construed,
thought, and brought into being? Drawing on the case of the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in
Chile, we explore the role of responsibility distribution, inscribed in the organization and
deployment of participatory exercises, in the performativity of citizens. Using in-depth
interviews, ethnographic data and archival material we compare three different post-disaster
participatory interventions, what we term participation apparatuses. Describing how participa-
tion theories and techniques were mobilized to define Bwho ought to do what,^ we argue that
different participation apparatuses enacted distinctive responsible publics. We label these
publics the epistemic, decisional and narrative responsible publics. Our larger point is that
research on the performativity of participation requires an expansion of both the settings of
public participation and the mechanisms of performativity within participation apparatuses.
Keywords Participation apparatus . Disasters . Performativity . Responsibility . Citizenship
BWe are planning the future of your city. That’s why your participation, and the
participation of the whole community, is crucial. If we all contribute with our ideas
and opinions, the plan will be much better^―PRES Constitución, Chile 2010c
* Manuel Tironi
metironi@uc.cl
1
Campus San Joaquín, Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña
Mackenna 4860, Macul, 7820436 Santiago, Chile
2
Centro de Investigación para la Gestión Integrada de Riesgo de Desastres CONICYT/FONDAP
15110017, Campus San Joaquín, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, 7820436 Santiago, Chile
On the morning of February 27, 2010, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake battered south-
central Chile. It was the sixth strongest earthquake in recorded history. The earthquake
and the subsequent tsunami had a devastating impact on more than 500 towns and
cities, affecting 1.8 million people and leaving 525 casualties behind (Ministerio de
Vivienda y Urbanismo [henceforth MINVU] 2010). The Sustainable Reconstruction
Plans (or PRES, Spanish acronym for Plan de Reconstrucción Sustentable) ad hoc
policy programs were devised to guide the rebuilding efforts at the local level, and
included an ambitious strategy to engage citizens into the post-disaster reconstruction
of the city. In contrast to traditional top-down practices, the PRES was thought to
inaugurate a new generation of planning policies in which the participation of citizens
and local groups would play a fundamental role (MINVU 2010). From focus groups
and surveys to online forums and charrette exercises, a myriad of techniques were
applied to bring citizens to the public front and for the elicitation of their opinions,
intentions, fears and priorities.
In this article, we explore the capacities of PRES’s participatory techniques to perform
particular types of post-disaster participants. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic
data and archival materials we argue that different techniques produced different types of
participant publics. Thus we claim, together with an increasing number of students of science
and technology, that participation as a material apparatus has ontological effects: Publics are
crafted into being within the experimental setting of participation. By comparing different
participatory techniques and their outcomes we are able to move beyond single-case evidence
and sustain this claim systematically, thus offering much needed empirical support for the
hypothesis that publics are performed within participatory exercises.
We also claim that disasters offer important nuances to the sociological research on
participation. The empirical material sustaining analyses on the modulation of publics
often comes from controlled and partial participatory exercises. In these, experts
expect to gain Blay knowledge^ about relatively abstract conflicts— usually projected
as one or multiple Bscenarios^ that are either disconnected from participants’ everyday
lives or staged pre-emptively in the expectation of a crisis yet to come.
However, in situations of radical uncertainty such as disasters, crises are vitally
tangible and engagement techniques are adjusted in vivo in the midst of the conflict.
In these settings deliberation and action are entangled, hence public participation is
not just about eliciting opinions but also about distributing responsibilities. What is at
stake in these participatory procedures is the definition of who must do what, where
and when. The citation opening this section comes from the PRES deployed in the
city of Constitución. While it might look like a generic celebration of participation,
the imperative— BIf we all contribute with our ideas and opinions, the Plan will be
much better^— has to be read in the context of a completely devastated city. By the
time the PRES was launched almost 80% of Constitución’s city center was on the
ground and several dozens of people were— and continue to be— missing. The PRES
needed the participation of citizens not just to validate a technocratic intervention;
more importantly, the engagement of neighbors was required to define what needed to
be done in a city that had to be built anew.
The role of this allocation of responsibility in the modulation of participants has
not been properly addressed in the sociological literature, nor in the science and
technology studies (STS) research. In this article we contribute to filling this gap by
focusing on how post-disaster participatory exercises instantiate certain forms of
citizenship by defining and distributing obligations, hence contributing both to the
sociology of participation (that has seldom focused on the materiality of public
engagement) and to STS (which have not integrated disasters as a relevant setting
of participation). We do so by systematically analyzing how different post-disaster
reconstruction plans devised and implemented what we call participation apparatus-
es— or the practical articulation of theoretical assumptions about participation, the
engineering of these assumptions into concrete engagement techniques, and the mate-
rial deployment of them in specific sites. More specifically, our results suggest the
formation of a typology of responsible publics— epistemic, decisional and narrative
publics— that are enacted through situated processes of responsibility allocation un-
dergone by post-disaster participative methodologies.
Participation Apparatuses: Public Participation, Performativity

and Disasters
Bringing Publics into Being
The involvement of the public in the governance of technopolitical conflicts, innovations and
institutions is a crucial tenet of liberal democracies and a key topic within various strands of
political and development sociology (Chambers 2003). The increasing participation of citi-
zens, collectives and communities has come to represent a movement towards pluralism and
direct democracy, which has risen over the last century to contest –and counterbalance—
managerial models of public administration that have proved insufficiently prepared to cope
with augmenting social complexity (Beck 1992; Delli Carpini et al. 2004; Giddens 1991). The
mismatch between expert capacities and citizen demands results in declining public confidence
in the processes of policy-making, reducing Btrust in those to whom the processes have
traditionally been conferred through election or recognition of expertise^ (Rowe and Frewer
2014).
Insofar as public engagement exercises proliferate in the wake of this Bdeliberative turn,^
the critical appraisal of the configuration and impacts of public participation has become an
important matter of scrutiny. Heeding the seminal work of Arnstein (1969) on the extent of
citizens’ power in public participation arenas, an important body of work has focused on
assessing the actual capacity of participation of delivering more democratic, open and inclu-
sive decision-making procedures (Rydin and Pennington 2010; Young 2002). Others (Baiocchi
et al. 2014; Lichterman 2006; Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014; Polleta 2002) have revisited the
meaning of Bcivic action^ in an attempt at integrating notions of difference, culture and
participatory styles in the analyses of the mechanisms at work in the making of collective
organization and action.
This research, however, has neglected to study the situated, mediated and interactional
phenomenology of participation, and the extent to which the physicality of participation—
the concrete deployment of technologies, spaces and materials— shapes the subjectivity
and engagement style of those participating (Marres 2012; Marres and Lezaun 2011). In
conventional sociological accounts, participation, as a subjective disposition, pre-exists

the participatory setting itself, being a condition explicated by factors outside the phe-
nomenological reach of the exercise. Participatory arenas are though to contain partici-
pants whose participatory styles, political values and civic attitudes are already configured
by sociocultural forces.
Science and technology studies have delineated a powerful correction to the
participation-participant nexus. STS scholars have convincingly suggested that public
participation— from online referenda to community assemblies and focus groups— has
performative affordances.1 As summarized by Lezaun et al. (2016, 201) reflecting on
the proliferation of participatory experiments, BThe public of [a participation] exper-
iment is not an ingredient added to the production of technoscience after the fact, so
to speak, but a form of relationality that emerges— is invoked, put to the test,
validated, or discarded— as part of the progress of the experiment itself^ (emphasis
in the original). The main argument is that as a situated socio-material arrangement,
participation does not only draw citizens into an interactive arena, but also helps to
define the nature of the participant (Chilvers and Kearnes 2015; Horst and Irwin
2010; Irwin 2001; Irwin 2006; Levidow and Marris 2001; Lezaun and Soneryd 2007;
Marres 2012; Michael 2009). Participants are not pre-existent subjects but are mate-
rially produced in the technical apparatuses thought to promote an encounter between
experts and publics (Girard and Stark 2007). BThe public,^ suggest Braun and Schultz
(2010, 406), Bis never immediately given but inevitably the outcome of processes of
naming and framing, staging, selection and priority setting, attribution, interpellation,
categorisation and classification.^
The performative mechanism of participation— or what we call the participation
apparatus— can be understood as a sequence of three productive moments (see Fig. 1).
First, it involves the definition of specific assumptions about optimal participation and
communication— assumptions against which publics are assessed and harnessed. These
theoretical orientations vary, from Habermasian notions of communicative rationality
in which participants are imagined as Bunbiased^ (Lezaun and Soneryd 2007) to
Actor-Network Theory, in which different constituencies are projected as Bsymmetric^
(Tironi 2014). They always, however, function as normative references guiding ex-
pectations about what types of knowledges and behaviors participants ought to
mobilize (Felt and Fochler 2010). Second, theoretical models inform the design of
procedures and techniques whose function is to match specific publics with the
expected types of opinions to be brought about. Theoretical assumptions are thus
not discursive or coercive but materially inscribed (Lezaun et al. 2016; Marres 2012;
Marres and Lezaun 2011). This is why the performance of publics is always at work
in participatory processes, Beven when their ostensible purpose is to allow the public
to frame the process in their own terms^ (Lezaun and Soneryd 2007, 292). Finally,
these techniques are implemented in Breal^ situations. Here, participation technologies
are arranged, repaired and also cancelled, as participants may contest the assumptions
and designs proposed by experts (Felt and Fochler 2010; Tironi 2015).
1
The notion of performativity originally stems from Austin’s (1962) distinction between those utterances that
describe a world already out there and those that do something. Taking these cues, philosophers, sociologists and
anthropologists have reflected on the capacity of materially-mediated practices to enact reality (see Callon 1999;
Licoppe 2010; MacKenzie 2007).
Fig. 1 Participation apparatus
Disasters and the Production of Responsibility
The performative capacity of public participation has been investigated only with regard to a
very limited repertoire of settings and engagement techniques. Most of the empirical evidence
comes from controlled participatory events in which the controversy is either irrelevant to non-
expert participants or else an abstract possibility not yet actualized. In these cases publics are
invited to voice their opinions on controversial issues (genetically modifiedorganisms, biomed-
ical challenges or nanotechnology advancements) but not to directly participate in the decision
making related to an actual and pressing controversy. Insofar as publics are exposed to distant
crises, actual policy decisions remain a latent possibility to be actualized in the unknown future.
In this paper we attempt to fill this gap by investigating the deployment of participation
apparatuses in context of disasters, settings that have been seldom scrutinized by both science
studies and the sociology of participation. Disasters, to be sure, have gained methodological
and theoretical relevance within sociology because, as a Bpunch^ to the system, they make
visible the material, institutional, cultural and political consensuses configuring normality
(Kreps 1998; Oliver-Smith 1999; Oliver-Smith 2002; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002; Perry
2005). In this context, disasters challenge in significant ways the way participation as
traditionally construed by both sociology and STS (for a review see Tironi et al. 2015). First,
as Btotalizing events^ (Oliver-Smith 1999, 20; see also Erikson 1994) disasters dissolve any
attempt to draw teleological or ordered sequences for decision-making. Commensurations,
chronological orderings and the allocation of causes and effects prove difficult to establish
because, as Law and Singleton (2006, 9) suggest, disasters Bcan in part be understood as a kind
of narrative implosion where there [is] not simply meaninglessness, but also too much
meaning, an excess.^ So while participation apparatuses often rely on the delimitation of
specific issues subject to the participatory exercise (Lezaun and Soneryd 2007), participation
in disaster settings deal with messier issues that cannot be disentangled from other objects nor
sequenced in rigid past/present/future, pre-event/event/post-event, or introduction/develop-
ment/conclusion storylines (Michael 2014).
Second, disasters do not involve just the malfunctioning of discrete networks or the
problematization of specific technoscientific knowledges, but the operational stability of life-
supporting systems (Lakoff and Collier 2010). In earthquakes, pandemics, tsunamis, wildfires,
or oil spills, the material fabric of our everyday lives is ferociously destroyed, killed, displaced
or reshuffled (Clark 2012). Thus participation is crafted and deployed in the Bhere and now^ of
extreme and uncontrollable situations. As radical disruptions that demand urgent— and vital—
responses, disasters reconfigure participation as a form of action upon the problems being
discussed, rather than replicating the usual emphasis on participation as a form of abstract
dialogue.
This action-driven mode of public participation demands new concerns on and distributions
of responsibility. When public engagement is devised as a decisional mechanism in the face of
urgent and radical crises, the critical question is upon whose shoulders the burden of devising
solutions should rest. Insofar as responsibility— defined as the allocation of liability with
regard to a collective problem— brings a moral duty into the public sphere, its delimitation and
assignment is inseparable from the articulation of citizenship.
Sociological research has established a strong linkage between responsibility and
citizenship. The usual sociological model configures citizenship as a historically
situated articulation between individuals and the state based on rights (entitlements
afforded to individuals and collectives), a territorial-based identity, and responsibilities
as the compliance of duties for the advancement or reinforcement of collectively
established values and goals (Delanty 1997; Marshall 1992). The nature, meaning
and practice of citizenship has been expanded and problematized by new conceptual
framings coming from feminist (Lister 1998; Young 1990) and transnational (Baubock
1994) perspectives. However, irrespective of their different instantiations, the notion of
responsibility is anchored in the general idea that citizens must actually do something
as opposed to being just recipients of the state’s services.
Interestingly, however, little sociological research has focused on how, where and by whom
civic responsibility is carried out. That is, we know little about how the distribution or
attribution of responsibility can perform specific modalities of citizenship— this is the main
contribution of our article. An interesting exception is the work of Barbara Cruikshank (1999).
In her research on welfare interventions in the US since the nineteenth century, Cruikshank
shows that organization of the liberal state rests on the configuration of a Bresponsible citizen^:
an autonomous yet altruist subject capable of acting in her own interest but also Bin solidarity
with others^ in politically engaged ways (Barbara Cruikshank 1999, 3). Crucial for our
argument, Cruikshank shows how this responsible citizen is not born but made through
specific normativities inscribed in methodologies and programs for poverty-alleviation, com-
munity empowerment and other state-led interventions. Her argument is that these
interventions— which she calls technologies of citizenship— are not limited to sanctioning or
enforcing conduct, but also produce certain types of subjectivities and personhoods, those that
we have come to recognize as pillars of the liberal state.
Disasters, as a particular sociological situation in which responsibility displays its subject-
making affordances, have been surprisingly neglected. To be sure, how, where and when
citizens engage in preparedness or mitigation actions in the context of catastrophes is a well-
researched topic within the sociology of disasters. As early as the United Nation’s BShelter
after Disaster^ (1982), and aligned with the broader shift within disaster management from
hazards and responsiveness to vulnerability and resilience (Quarantelli 1998), citizen partici-
pation has been identified as a crucial element in all aspects of the disaster cycle (Allen 2006;
Mileti 1999). The involvement of concerned communities and the inclusion of local knowl-
edge has proved fundamental for the definition of more accurate pre- and post-disaster
diagnoses (Pearce 2003). It has also been suggested that public participation increases the
sustainability and effectiveness of post-disaster interventions by enhancing the community’s
sense of empowerment and agency (Colin et al. 2007).
Importantly for this article, the sociology of disasters has also highlighted limitations faced
in the implementation of participatory processes in disaster contexts— limitations often linked
to the problem of political distribution (Tironi 2015). Indeed, the failure of post-disaster
participatory plans has usually been related to the unbalanced allocation of decision-making
capabilities between external experts and local communities (Colin et al. 2007; Méheux et al.
2010; Warner and Oré 2006). This unbalanced distribution of political power is reproduced
internally, resulting in an asymmetrical allocation of power between dominant and subaltern or
minority groups within local communities (Pearce 2003; Pelling 2007).
Focused on the power inequalities often at play in pre- and post-disaster interventions at
various scales, these approaches do not tackle responsibility as a sociological question or the
mechanisms by which the allocation of responsibility configures particular forms of citizen-
ship. STS scholars have addressed the ways in which responsibility is distributed in the context
of disasters and accidents (Hilgartner 2007; Jasanoff 1988; Jasanoff 1994; Wetmore 2007).
However, the emphasis has been on how operational and political responsibilities are allocated
throughout networked systems, and on the variegated tensions associated with their identifi-
cation. Little has been said about what type of responsibility is granted to non-experts when
invited to design solutions in participation exercises, and thus how these exercises emerge as
spaces for the configuration of citizens.
In sum, disasters open new avenues to think the performative capacities of participation
apparatuses. Inasmuch as disasters congeal participatory arenas in which urgent action is
elicited, the modulation of publics is affected not only by what participants ought to say and
know, but also by what responsibilities they are to be entrusted with in order to manufacture
efficient and democratic participatory processes. By attending to the apparatuses deployed for
engaging citizens in disaster settings, this paper expands sociological understandings on public
participation, while connecting in novel ways with STS and disaster studies.
Crafting a Reconstruction Plan: Methods and Cases
In 2010 the Chilean government launched six PRES to guide the post-disaster reconstruction of
severely damaged cities.2 Despite the differences between the six chosen urban centers and the
leeway given to each PRES to develop its own participatory exercises and planning recommen-
dations, the regulatory framework and operational requirements were the same for all PRES.
First, each PRES was configured as a consortium integrated by the Ministry of Housing and
Urban Development, the local municipality and a private donor. The planning team hired to
devise the reconstruction plan was accountable to this consortium. And while the inclusion of a
private donor was heavily criticized by NGOs and social organizations, the government— the
first right-wing government in the post-Pinochet era— argued that such an extended catastro-
phe required fast, effective and flexible responses that the state was unable to deliver. Second,
all PRES had to be delivered within 90 days. Lastly— and crucially in terms of their political
feasibility— each PRES had the mandate to secure a participatory process. As we will show
later, each PRES designed and implemented its own participatory methodologies, including
focus groups, surveys, open meetings, online platforms, charrette exercises and referendums.
Despite these common directives, each PRES was given relative autonomy, particularly in
relation to its participatory approach. Without clear definitions, each plan interpreted differ-
ently the meaning of Bparticipation,^ Bcommunity^ and Bempowerment.^ Indeed, public
participation included disparate techniques, from open-air festivals in PRES Pelluhue to
discussion groups in PRES Curicó and a public referendum in PRES Constitución.
For our methodological objectives, the PRES’s the regulatory scheme offers a favorable
situation of case variability (different participatory techniques) controlled by homogeneous
2
The reconstructions plans were PRES Consitución, PRE Talca, PRES Juan Fernández, PRES Curicó, PRES
Pelluhue and PRES Lincantén. It should be noted that, rather confusingly, some documents list more than six
cases, which is because two PRES include more than one town: PRES Pelluhue included Pelluhue and Curanipe,
while PRES Licantén involved Iloca, Duao and La Pesca.
factors (same challenge, regulatory requirements and policy objectives). This does not mean
that the cases are fully and unproblematically comparable; each PRES is an independent and
incomparable world (Deville et al. 2013; Stengers 2011). Our aim is, however, to search for a
method suitable for assessing the performative capacities of responsibility allocation in post-
disaster participation, attending at the same time to the potential variation of the mechanism by
which performativity unfolds.
We chose three PRES for our comparative exercise. We defined our selection criteria based
on two variables. The first criterion was organizational similarity: We looked for PRES
sharing similar epistemic cultures and internal conditions in an attempt to minimize ideological
and professional biases. We thus selected PRES led by architects— instead of engineers or
social scientists— assuming that, despite their diversity, architects as a community of practice
would share a particular way of approaching the social (Yaneva 2012). The second criterion
was methodological dissimilarity: We chose cases that, despite their organizational homoge-
neity, utilized different public participation techniques. This strategy allowed us to isolate,
where possible, the effects of participation techniques.
The three cases we selected are PRES Constitución, PRE Talca3 and PRES Juan Fernández.
This selection ensures both high internal homogeneity and high external variability. For each
PRES we conducted in-depth interviews with relevant members of the team as well as
ethnographic observations in the case of Constitución and Talca. A number of interviews with
officials from the central and regional government were also conducted. Finally, we gathered
and analyzed archival material and documents, reports, PowerPoint presentations and briefs
from each PRES, as well as official governmental documents.
One Earthquake, Three Techniques
PRES Constitución
Constitución (population 46,000) is a costal mid-sized city situated 500 km from Santiago, in
the Maule river estuary. The earthquake and subsequent tsunami impacted the area severely,
resulting in 80 casualties and leaving more than 3000 people with seriously damaged houses
(Gobierno de Chile 2010). Following the disaster, Forestal Aracuco, a large forestry company
and the main economic engine in the area,4 took on the responsibility of financing the design
of the reconstruction plan.
Arauco has a long and conflictive history in Constitución. Until the 1960s the city was a
seaside resort for the region’s upper classes, which were attracted to the city by its long, dark-
sand beaches and its stunning natural environment. In the late 1950s Arauco installed its
cellulose plant. The plant brought wealth to the city but most residents blame Arauco for the
deterioration of Constitución natural beauties and the withering of its tourist appeal. The
participation of Arauco, which fully covered the costs of the PRES, was an attempt to
compensate the historic debt with Constitución and to celebrate the firm’s engagement with
city’s future.
3
The reconstruction plan of Talca was called PRE Talca and not PRES Talca owing to a specific political
disagreement. For all other purposes, PRES and PRE are equivalent.
4
The involvement of Arauco in Constitución’s reconstruction plan was severely criticized by local NGOs and
civic groups, and exposed the complexities of Constitución’s development trajectory and power structures. For a
more detailed account see Tironi (2015).
With fresh funding from Arauco, the design process was catalyzed by the hiring of two key
actors: Elemental, the architecture firm led by the famous architect Alejandro Aravena; and
ARUP, a renowned engineering and design firm. The architects from Elemental led the team.
PRES Constitución articulated a particular participatory methodology for post-disaster
scenarios. Instrumental to this approach was the fact that months before the earthquake and
tsunami the team in charge of devising the participatory plan had begun developing an
innovative participatory methodology in Constitución as part of Arauco’s corporate social
responsibility program. As the coordinator of the PRES explained to us:
We were developing a methodology called the Foros Híbridos [hybrid forums] which
was about combining different knowledges, different ways of knowing. The idea is quite
powerful. I mean, it goes a little bit against the grain of traditional public participation,
which is more general, information-based, not binding.
An architect involved in the process gave us specific details about the open ethos of foros
híbridos:
Foros híbridos were formed by different participants representing different interests of

the community…It is not a forum composed by experts, it is not conformed by
scientists, no. In foros híbridos you have representatives of the municipality, the town’s
priest, representatives of the firemen, of the army, of small businesses, of the farmers
market, of the fishermen. Nobody is left out.
What we want to stress is the experimental discourse driving Foros Híbridos. As
captured in the above quotations, there is a sense of newness and excitement: The
sense that the methodology was itself the incarnation of a forward-looking mode of
thinking and doing, an intervention that was widening the boundaries of public
engagement and challenging traditional hierarchies of expertise.5 Public participation
was viewed, in other words, as part of a larger project of Bentrepreneurial
government^ (Rose 1999). Invocations to Binnovation,^ Bfutures,^ and other concepts
articulating the grammar of what Nigel Thrift (2005) has called the cultural circuits of
capitalism abound in PRES Constitución’s documents and statements. The broader
objectives of the plan were to think Bthe city anew^ (PRES Constitución 2010a) and
to build the foundations of the Constitución Byet to come…the future city of the next
20 years,^ as one of the plan’s designers told us.
The objective of Foros Híbridos was explicitly to create an Bopen^ participatory apparatus
in which everyone could participate regardless of their age, sex, class, ethnic background or
political position. Moreover, the apparatus had to secure a Bsymmetric^ engagement, meaning
a Bspace in which all positions (the technician and the layperson, the representative and the
represented) [have] the same hierarchical status^ (PRES Constitución 2010b, 25). Foros
Híbridos were deliberative meetings conducted at Casa Abierta, a free-to-enter information
and community center located in Constitución’s main square, which became the PRES
headquarters. In each of these meetings a specific issue related to the reconstruction process
5
The fact that this methodology was inspired by the notion of Bhybrid forums^ proposed by Michael Callon
(2009), a leading figure in Actor-Network Theory, is indicative of the forward-looking search behind Foros
Híbridos.
was debated. A total of nine Foros Híbridos were held at Casa Abierta. To ensure the
symmetry of the forum, each Foro Híbrido had to guarantee the presence of at least one
technical expert on the issue at stake, often from the government, and one citizen counterpart
with hands-on and experiential knowledge, usually affected individuals or collectives. The task
of the PRES team was to present proposed solutions and, as experts on the community, to
make sure that every voice in the debate was heard and accounted for.
While PRES Constitución, via Foros Híbridos, was to be an iconic demonstration of
forward thinking, it also had to prove its replicability and efficiency. PRES Constitución
imposed on itself a 90-day deadline for delivering the plan, which, together with a political
climate favoring fast, technocratic post-disaster solutions (Gould et al. 2016), imbued the
PRES with a sense of urgency and resolution. It had to secure highly technical outcomes
immediately. PRES Constitución therefore had to be innovative, democratic, and bold, but also
effective, accountable, and resolute. The tension among the PRES designers around the nature
and role of Bproposals^ is indicative. When asked about the functioning of Foros Híbridos, an
architected answered bluntly about the need of doing participation around concrete projects
defined by planners and architects:
If there isn’t a proposal on the table, participation is null…we [planners] have to arrive
with a conceptual proposition to be discussed at the Foros, that was key. Some technical
proposals didn’t offer much space for debate, either because there were security or
financial issues involved, but the rest were open for community intervention.
Engagement, as construed by PRES Constitución, needed to avoid pure speculation. This
shows the complex mixture between participation, experimentation, and efficiency driving the
process. Unwittingly, the requirement of delivery and efficiency gave Foros Híbridos a
classroom-like atmosphere (see Fig. 2). According to one participant, Foros Híbridos were
Bvery monotonous meetings, without life…like going to school to be informed…You arrived,
you sat, and that’s it. We finished. Nothing else to say.^
The fact that PRES’s professionals’ dress and self-presentation made class, ethnic and
social differences between neighbors and planners evident did not help. In his fieldnotes,
Fig. 2 Foro Híbrido, 24 June 2010 (PRES Constitución, 2010a)

Manuel, one of the researchers on the project, used the following to describe them: BMac
laptops, stylish clothes and skinny bodies.^ Not surprisingly then, as a fisherman rightly
observed, Bpeople were scared^ of them. Actually, most did not even understand them. A local
radio DJ put it bluntly:
To the people that come from the countryside you may show them this [an architecture
design], BLook at this view, check out this project,^ but they won’t understand a thing.
You have to speak to them in their language…you don’t have to teach them
statistics...But here they take them to the PRES [Foros Híbridos] to talk about the
percentage of destroyed houses.
The result was that low-income lay residents— fishermen, peasants, the unemployed— never
talked. The participatory apparatus designed by the PRES was to encourage discussion, but it
failed. Confronted by incomprehensible, affluent, scary professionals, most neighbors pre-
ferred silence. A community leader from La Poza, remembering his experience at a Foro
Híbrido, described for us the hierarchical logic of these events: BYou come to these Foros and
there may be 40 people in there, but those who talk are always the same, those that are more
involved in the [political] issues, the leaders, and they make you notice the [knowledge]
differences.
Despite initial expectations, the spatial and practical experience of Foros Híbridos was
asymmetrical, hierarchical and even tedious. The main point here is that this socio-spatial
disposition indicates the way local knowledge was defined and mobilized. It was indeed
celebrated and sought after, but only as a means to validate the architects’ proposals, not as
a potential source of novel solutions, hence the school-like configuration of Foros
Híbridos.
This implied important consequences for the process. For example, any kind of evaluation
of pre-existent conditions was eliminated. As put by one architect:
From the standpoint of architecture, there was one key factor explaining the type of
participation we conducted, and it has to do with the fact that in Constitución, given the
urgency, we skipped any diagnosis...skipping the diagnosis meant making a pretty fast
and risky proposal.
The Bfast and risky^ spirit of PRES Constitución deemed diagnosis, often a privileged moment
for participatory methodologies in post-disaster reconstruction, unnecessary. Thus, while
Foros Híbridos refined the architectural solutions proposed for the city, questions such what
was the actual condition of Constitución, where its critical problems were, and what the
solutions to these problems might be tended to be answered solely by the technical team.
The projects debated in Foros Híbridos were finally voted on in a massive referendum. The
voters had to rank projects and approve the most important project of the plan: the construction
of a large anti-tsunami green park, the Maule Fluvial Park, PRES Constitución’s flagship
project (Tironi and Farías 2015).
The anti-tsunami park was the PRES’s most controversial proposal for two reasons. First,
because its construction required the expropriation of all the buildings on the riverfront— an
unacceptable measure for many residents and proprietors. And second, because the submission
of the anti-tsunami park to an open referendum became a contested issue within the PRES. An
architect summarized the conflict as follows:
I wasn’t in favor of making the referendum in terms of Bpark^ or Bno park^ because, in
reality, the Bno park^ option was irresponsible from a technical perspective. If the Bno park^
decision were selected, we would have been in trouble because we were hired to come up
with an anti-tsunami strategy. And if there were no park then the city could be destroyed again
by a wave. There was an incompatibility. Conceptually, I felt violated with the Bno park^ as
an option.
Not everyone within the team had the same perspective on the moral obligations posed to them
as professionals.
It was an important issue because there laid all the validity of the plan. We supported the
idea of submitting the project to an open vote, but the municipality and Arauco had
fears. And here we arrive to the most profound dimension of participation. Because
Arauco liked the participation plan, they liked the Foros, they found them useful, but
when it when push came to shove…experts tend to say that we know better what is good
for the people, so why would we ask them: BWhich is the best solution?^
The debate around the referendum elicits the practical labor of different epistemic and
professional cultures in the configuration of public participation. We will return to that in
the conclusions. For now it is important to highlight how the tension over the Maule Fluvial
Park was framed in terms of responsibilities: To what extent did the autonomy of the public
have to be defended, even at the cost of suboptimal— or even Birresponsible^— results from a
technical perspective?
The architects finally agreed that the construction of the anti-tsunami park would be
decided in an open referendum, but demanded that the Bpark^ and Bno park^ options would
be accompanied by technical descriptions of these proposals and their consequences. A mass-
distributed leaflet instructed citizens on the pros and cons of each option. If the anti-tsunami
park were not constructed, it explained, Constitución would suffer Bfloods every two years^
(PRES Constitución 2010c); furthermore, neither the inundation level nor the speed of the
wave would be reduced in the case of a tsunami, and the Bpublic green areas of Constitución^
(PRES Constitución 2010c) would not increase. In contrast, with the park the city would suffer
floods only every 25 years, inundation levels would be reduced by between 23% and 28%, the
speed of the tsunami wave would be reduced by between 34% and 41%, and public green
spaces would be augmented by an astonishing 1300% (PRES Constitución 2010c). The
referendum ended up prescribing the decision regarding the anti-tsunami park as a normative
pronouncement about international standards, quality of life, and moral obligations. As a
government officer told us— not without irony— during an interview, BThis referendum had
two fundamental answers: Bpark,^ a wonderful city; and Bno park,^ almost hell. Not surpris-
ingly, 90% approved.^
In sum, PRES Constitución devised a participatory apparatus that fostered knowledge
symmetry, openness and integration. But its methodology harnessed a particular linkage
between knowledge and obligations, one that enacted a responsible citizen who was entitled
to debate, highlight and transcend entrenched epistemic disparities— but who would not bear
the responsibility of making decisions. Throughout the participation process experts engaged
with the public by presenting a technical solution that was open to alteration by the community
knowledge articulated during Foros Híbridos. Citizens’ knowledge framed and enriched the
debate, but it fell on the experts to decide how to include this information in the final solution.
PRES Juan Fernández
The Juan Fernández archipelago was seriously damaged by the tsunami, particularly Robinson
Crusoe, the archipelago’s main island, which is home to 95% of its approximately 1000
inhabitants. More than 200 residents were seriously affected, and 16 lives were lost (Ministerio
de Vivienda y Urbanismo, 2010). The Association of Architecture Offices (or AOA for its
acronym in Spanish) was the technical team in charge of leading PRES Juan Fernández, with the
Municipality of Lo Barnechea, one of the wealthiest boroughs in the country, as the private donor.
If the team of PRES Constitución arrived in the city with clear theories about what
participation ought to be, the team of PRES Juan Fernández arrived, in their own words,
Bwith nothing.^ BWe said, ‘Let’s see what happens,’^ explained PRES Juan Fernández’
leading architect, BWe were going [to Juan Fernández] with nothing, [because as an architect]
you must begin every project from scratch.^
A soft utilitarianism, however, imbued the approach to public participation taken in Juan
Fernández. Although not formalized as an explicit theoretical program, in Juan Fernández the
PRES team mobilized the liberal assumption that individuals participate when motivated by
interest-based objectives, as explained by one architect:
[The disaster] is an opportunity for real citizen involvement, because what is at stake is
Bmy house,^ Bmy destroyed neighborhood,^ Bmy destroyed seaside,^ Bmy destroyed
heritage,^ so BI’m involved,^ BI’m part of the problem.^…People were available to
really engage with the reconstruction processes.
This view of individuals as mobilized by selfish incentives led to a particular moral economy of
obligations. Very early in the process the PRES team demanded that residents take full
responsibility for their own problems, actions, and commitments. One architect put it as follows:
People with interests in a particular cause have to actively participate in the creation of a
document, but not casually; they have obligations too. Obligations to meet, obligations
to inform their people, obligations to help reach consensus when possible and obliga-
tions to take responsibility for representing the affected people.
This liberal ethos shaped PRES’s participatory architecture in Juan Fernández. For example,
while in Constitución the diagnosis was carried out by PRES technicians, in Juan Fernández,
under a regime of liberal obligations, the diagnosis was conducted entirely by the residents:
People give you the diagnosis, they know what they want...they are the experts, and they
did the diagnosis for us. They gathered representatives of the fishermen, of social
centers, of football clubs, of commerce associations, of the municipality, and so on.
They told us what was good and bad before the process. They oriented us regarding
what the island was and what it wants to be.
Following these principles, PRES Juan Fernández devised an ad hoc participatory methodol-
ogy based on the charrette technique. Charrettes are intensive hands-on sessions, usually
involving direct intervention on maps and other forms of drawing, where citizens, technicians
and others co-design a plan.6 Charrettes thus attempt to create immediate (i.e. the separation
6
The definition and utilization of charrettes in Europe is somewhat different, with a less significant role of
drawing and visual projection and a more prominent role of written records.
between opinion and decision is minimized) and collaborative (i.e. the result is co-authored by
all participants) participation arenas (EPA 2013). And accordingly, charrette exercises were
implemented in Juan Fernández with the explicit goal of materializing a democratic atmo-
sphere (Lezaun and Calvillo 2013) in which an agreement would be reached by co-designing
the plan. As the lead architect explained, BWhat we did was to gather everyone in the same
room so they could shoot each other [expose their discrepancies], and then, once things were
agreed, we put out a plain topographic map and we sketched over it.^
The charrette exercise was conducted for three consecutive days (see Fig. 3). Representa-
tives from the community— regional government, local government, victims, fishermen,
commerce, school and sport organizations— sat together in a meeting room. Issues were raised
and debated while the architects sketched the agreed upon ideas on the topographic plan.
Without deferring decision-making, the diagnosis of the situation and the debate over design
solutions for equipment, infrastructure, and housing occurred simultaneously.
This design process resulted in a consensual plan supported and signed by all participants. It
soon became evident that by involving citizens in the actual design of solutions, the charrette
experiment served as contractual device that established a particular political agreement not
only between the residents and PRES technicians but also among the residents themselves. This
is how one of the architects explained to us the political affordances of the charrette exercises:
One example. I just called [to Juan Fernández] because they are building a multi-sport
court. So I call one of the guys there and I say to him: BDude, you are gonna put the court
too close to this other thing and you’re gonna have a problem later.^ And it’s them, not the
state, not the SUBDERE (Regional Development Office), not the SERVIU (Regional
Housing Development Office), it’s them who take the decision and move the courty 10
meters right away. But for making that call these guys have to understand why it is
important to re-locate the court, to establish some kind of intimacy with the project.
We want to underline the notion of Bintimacy^ utilized by the PRES architect, the
concept he uses to represent the type affective and political empowerment provoked by
the participatory exercise. Through the practice of thinking collectively about their
Fig. 3 Charrette (Source: PRES

Juan Fernández, 2010)
livelihoods, the project enlivened what some authors refer to as a politics of care (Puig
de la Bellacasa 2017; Tironi and Rodríguez-Giralt 2017), or the capacity of practices of
repairing, caring, and healing to produce alternative political projects. In the case of Juan
Fernández, the charrette exercise congealed a notion of liberal social contract or
Bagreement^ in which those in charge— both politically and technically— of the project
was the concerned collective itself, without intermediaries. BThis agreement was so
important,^ recalled one PRES architect, Bthat today, if we wanted to change the plan,
we couldn’t, because they [the citizens] would oppose us.^
Another ethnographic vignette illustrates the affective-contractual affordances of the
charrette exercise and the type of responsible citizens it enacted. When the construction of
houses was about to begin, a conflict arose. The design for the new housing units was first
outlined during the charrette exercises. Two months later, seven detailed designs were
presented for community deliberation. However, residents stated that none of the seven
alternatives were what they were looking for or what they agreed upon during the charrette
exercise. The design and the materials, the neighbors claimed, were not what they had
discussed. BThe context changed abruptly,^ explained an architect: BThe atmosphere changed
and the relationship broke, and they [the neighbors] decided not to carry on with the elected
design…they didn’t like the typology, nor the materials. So neighbors turned the project upside
down^ (dieron vuelta el cuento).
Neighbors were not willing to give up their achievements. And more importantly, they were
not willing to disarticulate the process they had invested in and by which they had gained
political and technical clout. The solution, proposed by the neighbors themselves, was to conduct
another charrette to refine the housing design. This entailed significant technical and bureaucratic
arrangements not included in the original plan, and extremely rare to achieve in normal
circumstances. A PRES architect described the situation, half-jokingly and half-amazed:
The SERVIU [Regional Service for Housing Development] chief of staff calls me saying that
they needed totally new blueprints for the houses. He had to completely change the project…
and here, in this office, which was not in charge of the design itself, we had to assemble a new
project from scratch in one week, a project aligned with what neighbors wanted.
We want to underline the capacity of neighbors, through the intimacy the charrette exercises
provoked among themselves and between them and the project, to mobilize resources and
push for technical and administrative changes otherwise unachievable by communities in the
top-down Chilean system of urban and housing development.
In summary, PRES Juan Fernández devised a participatory methodology that articulated a
particular relationship between the project and the affected residents. The charrettes, which
were based on the assumption of interest-oriented individuals, fostered an affective and
contractual attachment to the project through co-design. Charrette thus molded participants
not only as vocal citizens, but also as direct bearers of the responsibility for the solutions they
collaboratively developed.
PRE Talca
With almost 250,000 inhabitants, Talca is the regional capital and the largest city in the
Maule Region. The earthquake destroyed its historic city center, caused 28 fatalities, and
more than 30,000 people were left without shelter (Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo
2010). Following the quake, the Hurtado-Vicuña group, a large holding with historic
links to the region, agreed to finance and led the PRE via Inmobiliaria El Bosque, a real
estate firm owned by Vicuña-Hurtado group. In turn, Inmobiliaria El Bosque hired Polis,
a renowned architecture firm, to design the reconstruction plan and conduct the partic-
ipatory exercises.
The involvement of the Hurtado-Vicuña group was bitterly resisted by several community
organizations in Talca. Suspicions of real estate speculation proliferated, together with fears of
a technocratic planning process that would neglect the participation of citizen organizations
and NGOs. Actually, Talca con Tod@s, an alternative reconstruction plan led by community
organizations, was launched a couple of weeks after the kick-off of PRE Talca (Tironi 2014).
While Foros Híbridos in Constitución drew on STS theories and charrettes in Juan
Fernández on liberal-utilitarian premises, PRE Talca’s participatory methodology rested on
the assumption that participation was simply not central to the reconstruction plan. To put it
another way, for PRE Talca public participation was a political requirement, not a technical
one. Actually, public participation was not included as an area of expertise in the original
planning team. As asserted by the PRE executive director,
We assembled an ad-hoc team with planners from Polis, one team in charge of doing the
strategic analysis of the city, and we internally contributed with a team of engineers to
calculate costs, possibilities and feasibilities. So finally we assembled a master plan
proposal with all those dimensions managed as a team.
Participation was simply not on the technical radar. BNobody obliges you to engage with
citizens; it’s more like a moral issue,^ said the architect that was finally commissioned with the
task of public participation during his interview with us.
Thus, PRE Talca assumed very early in the process that public participation was a
procedure to inform and educate laypersons, who are often inclined, due to their lack of
knowledge, to distort and misunderstand otherwise undisputed technical facts. This form of
deploying participation has been called the Bdeficit model^ (Wynne 1991; Wynne 1995) or the
‘public education model’ (Callon 1999). The crucial point is the epistemological asymmetry
assumed by PRE Talca. Architects assumed an incommensurable void separated citizens from
the technicalities of post-disaster reconstruction planning. The architect leading public engage-
ment put it straightforwardly:
Maybe I wasn’t an expert [in post-disaster planning], but compared to the people I was
a super-expert. People kind of let themselves be guided by preconceived ideas. They
have images and prejudices, and that limits their participation in planning initiatives, that
usually are quite open to participation…[In PRE Talca] we invited everyone to partic-
ipate, and those that didn’t, it’s just because they didn’t want to.
The assumed ignorance of the general public became the pivotal political assumption from
which the entire participatory apparatus was devised in Talca. The lack of public involvement
in Talca was not a situation to overcome but an anthropological condition that needed to be
respected and a political guideline that had to frame the entire process. More specifically, PRE
Talca assumed that the disengagement of talquinos meant that they were practical and wanted
action and change, not deliberation. They were tired of being asked; now they wanted
solutions. Or, as a municipal officer explained,
People are sick of participation, of surveys…they have responded the same way so
many times…they want solutions and not endless blah blah. Because there are all these
characters coming here! [They say] BLet’s do a survey to know this and that.^ That has
been done so many times that people are angry. No more discussions, nothing; they want
solutions.
Building on these assumptions, PRE Talca devised a participatory apparatus based on two
techniques. The first was the Encuesta Ciudadana (Citizen Survey), which was conducted online,
through PRE Talca’s website, and face to face.7 Based on the assumption that talquinos were
technically illiterate, the survey was conducted when the design process was nearly completed,
and was intended more as a narrative-making device than as an actual platform for engagement.
The survey was a one-page questionnaire comprised of five questions, three of which were
pre-defined response options (see Fig. 3). With questions such as BSelect a place to be depicted
on Talca’s postcard^ or BIndicate the place in Talca you like the most,^8 the goal of the survey
was to capture the emotional connection of citizens with their city, and to utilize this
information for the communication and PR strategy of the plan.
In 2010 a total of 3473 face-to-face surveys were completed between June 2nd and 9th.
However, these Encuestas Ciudadanas were severely criticized by civic organizations and
NGOs for patronizing residents and lacking basic methodological validity. In response, PRE
Talca hired a polling firm to conduct a study that surveyed 2792 individuals from July 22nd to
the 26th. Conventional sampling protocols were followed, the questionnaire’s phrasing was
revised, and new sociodemographic questions were added. However, the survey’s objective
remained the same: Respondents were asked to Bimagine^ their city, to give information about
preferred locations, and to rank potential interventions.
The second technique applied by PRE Talca was Conversaciones Ciudadanas (Citizen
Conversations). These were open meetings organized in different neighborhoods to present
PRE Talca’s projects and to receive feedback from the community. A total of seven meetings
were held between May and July 2010, with attendance ranging from seven to 60 people.
Despite the efforts made to demarcate the autonomy of PRE Talca concerning the
local government, Conversaciones Ciudadanas were functionally and politically
enmeshed with the municipal political machinery (Tironi 2014). The call for participation
was made by the Municipality’s Department of Community Development and not by
PRE Talca. Additionally, meetings were held in the quarters of junta de vecinos (neigh-
borhood councils), formal community-based organizations widely questioned for their
lack of representation and their government dependence (Delamaza 2005).
Conversaciones Ciudadanas were usually attended by elderly citizens, most of who
were enrolled from existent municipal networks. In other words, Conversaciones
Ciudadanas were designed as an extension of the municipality’s participation apparatus.
Conversaciones Ciudadanas did not just convoke the same constituencies but also
reproduced the same participatory dynamics of municipal participation spaces. Indeed,
as shown in Fig. 4, these conversations resembled the more conventional, one-way
educational arenas usually articulated in participatory exercises at the local level in Chile
7
For the application of the face-to-face survey, key points of the city were selected, such as the mall, the railway
station and the main square.
8
The questions were: (1) What is missing in the city? (2) Select a place for Talca’s postcard (3) If you could
select a place in the city to live, what place would you choose? (4) Indicate the place in Talca you like the
most and (5) Indicate the place in Talca you like the least.
Fig. 4 Conversación Ciudadana in El Prado, Talca (PRE Talca, 2011)
(Tironi et al. 2011) than dialogical deliberative forums. Debate was generally absent from
Conversaciones Ciudadanas. A passage from our field notes written during one of these
Conversaciones is illustrative:
While the objective is interaction and people can give their opinions, the options given
by the architect are quite limited...for example [in one of the Conversaciones
Ciudadanas] an attendant wondered if houses could have better doors, a requirement
to which everyone adhered. The architect, a bit uncomfortable, responded, BThat is
something that has to be evaluated.^
In sum, Encuestas Ciudadanas and Conversaciones Ciudadanas assumed that citizens were
by and large illiterate and apolitical, and therefore unable to bear any civic responsibilities
(let alone technical duties). These assumptions crystallized in participation methodologies that
molded Bthe citizen^ as very specific sociodemographic and that limited the responsibilities of
citizens to the delivery of broad perceptions about the city. They thereby enforced— and to
some extent produced— a particular type of civic obligation, one that was related neither to the
transfer of knowledge nor to distribution of technical liability, but rather to the provision of
abstract and non-expert narratives about Talca.
Conclusions: Epistemic, Decisional and Narrative Responsible Citizens
In this article we have analyzed how three participation apparatuses defined and materialized
different ways of being a responsible citizen. Insofar as our cases were applications of the same
policy program, we were able to compare systematically the performative affordances of the three
apparatuses in question. More specifically, we focused on how responsibility, defined as the
entitlement granted to participants to design and manage solutions in the context of sociotechnical
crises, was defined differently, allocated, and inscribed in participation theories, techniques and
on-site methodological deployments, and thus instantiated different responsible publics.
Our results suggest that Foros Híbridos, charrettes and Encuestas/Conversaciones
Ciudadanas put forward different versions of what responsibility means in post-disaster
planning. If responsibility is a moral obligation geared towards the production of a collective

order, then these techniques, by distributing obligations, enacted different modes of being part
of the social. In other words, the three participation apparatuses here analyzed performed
different kinds of responsible citizens.
We call the public performed in PRES Constitución the epistemic responsible citizen.
Indeed, Foros Híbridos framed responsibility as a matter of knowledge. These techniques
instantiated a citizen who was asked to bear the responsibility of forming opinions, of debating
with technicians, of voicing her thoughts and sentiments in order to augment the knowledge
that shaped specific technical projects and interventions— a citizen held responsible for the
enlivenment of a democratic forum in which different perspectives and sensitivities would
interact to enrich the technical proposals of the plan. The actual design and management of
these technical proposals, however, was out of reach for non-specialist participants. The risks
were too high and the requirements of the process too exacting to charge citizens with the
responsibility of devising and governing technical solutions. Foros Híbridos and the referen-
dum were about knowledge making, not decision making; thus, the PRES instantiated a citizen
loaded with knowledge responsibility but deprived of any technical or political obligation.
In Juan Fernández another type of responsible citizen was produced, one we call the
decisional responsible citizen. The PRES’s team assumed that, as autonomous and entrepre-
neurial individuals, community members had to be capable of, and thus responsible for,
managing their own problems. Hence, charrettes articulated responsibility as a matter not only
of knowledge provision but also of decisional competence: The participatory apparatus shaped
individuals as citizens able to collaborate with their peers and be contractually liable in the
search for solutions— or what planners called intimacy. And Bsolutions^ in this case were not
complementary opinions or lateral suggestions, but actual decisions over technical matters. In
Juan Fernández local people had to find and decide ways to move forward.
Finally, we label the particular public enacted by PRE Talca the narrative responsible
citizen. PRE Talca assumed that local community members, as technically illiterate individ-
uals, had no interest in deliberation, let alone technical engagement. Hence, the participatory
methodologies put forward in Talca did not require participants to produce knowledge or make
technical decisions; instead, citizens were charged with the responsibility of creating affective
narratives about the city. By means of surveys and meetings, the public enriched the
architects’ contextual knowledge about the city, delivering aesthetic accounts of Talca.
Encuestas Ciudadanas and Conversaciones Ciudadanas viewed participants as citizens with
the obligation of describing Talca in emotional terms and of eliciting the symbolic and
imaginary dimensions of the city. However, citizens were denied any knowledge or decisional
duties (Table 1).
Table 1 Types of responsible publics performed by post-disaster participation apparatuses
Enacted Public Theories Participatory technology Type of responsibility
Epistemic STS, Actor-network Foros Híbridos Voicing opinions and

Responsible Citizen theory supplementing expert
knowledge.
Decisional Liberal utilitarism Charrette Making decisions,
Responsible Citizen articulating collective
commitment.
Narrative Deficit model Encuestas and Deliver aesthetic narratives
Responsible Citizen Conversaciones Ciudadanas about the city.
We conclude with three observations. First, our comparative analysis suggests that partic-
ipation apparatuses do have performative capacities. Three different apparatuses produced,
ceteris paribus, different results. Publics, far from being a generic category, were distinctively
harnessed and molded depending on what type of theories and techniques were mobilized for
their engagement. Needless to say, the types identified in this article should not be read as
concluding categories. Indeed, several crossovers and juxtapositions could be observed in the
field. In spite of this difficulty, our results allow us to confirm what several previous single-
case studies have suggested: that the material articulation of participation is not neutral in the
production of public participants.
Second, our results suggest that an inquiry into the performativity of public participation
needs to extend the inventory of both the settings of engagement and the fields of
performation. On the one hand, disasters need to be taken into account as particular settings
in which public participation overflows— and at some extent challenges— the political and
material configuration of secluded, lab-like, pre-emptive modes of participation. We must
ask: To what extent is the design of the participation apparatus, and the consequent enactment
of a public, not defined just by the object of participation but also by the setting over which the
apparatus unfolds? What types participation apparatuses— and democratic publics— are being
imagined and applied in the context of proliferating in vivo experiments in the fields of market
innovation (Muniesa and Callon, 2007), environmental management (Rojas 2015), and geo-
engineering (Bellamy and Lezaun 2017)? Our results call for more research on these questions.
On the other hand, we suggest that under certain circumstances the mechanism of
performativity within participation apparatuses is not knowledge but responsibility. Publics
are enacted in and through participation apparatuses not just the provocation, we claim, of
publics through the instantiation and validation of certain modes of knowing— but also via the
designation of political, practical, and moral duties.
Finally, while our account highlights some of the conflicts triggered around and by each of
the PRES, it does not fully show the variegated contestations that each case study ignited. The
implementation of each PRES was far from neat and harmonious. Civic contestations,
technical failures and political conflicts proliferated. More importantly for our purposes, the
responsibility regimes invoked by the PRES were continuously challenged by alternative
definitions of what it meant to be a responsible citizen (Tironi 2014, 2015). Put another
way, performativity is not a frictionless process; participants were not always passively lured
into these participatory experiments, being meekly modulated into epistemic, decisional or
narrative responsible publics. Participation apparatuses also enacted (Povinelli 2011) the
multiple relations, materials, projects, and actors that resisted and endured against the proposed
definitions and roles. A better understanding of the ontological inventiveness of public
participation requires more research into these moments of overflow and ambivalence.
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
References
Allen, Katrina. 2006. Community-based disaster preparedness and climate adaptation: local capacity building in
the Philippines. Disasters 30 (1): 81–101.
Arnstein, S. 1969. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Planning Association 35 (4): 216–
224.
Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Klein, and Stephanie Savell. 2014. The Civic
Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life. London: Routledge.
Baubock, Rainer. 1994. Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration.
Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.
Bellamy, Robert, and Javier Lezaun. 2017. Crafting a public for geoengineering. Public Understanding of
Science 26 (4): 402–417.
Braun, Kathrin, and Susanne Schultz. 2009. ‘... A certain amount of engineering involved’: Constructing the
public in participatory governance arrangements. Public Understanding of Science 19: 403–419.
Braun, Kathrin, and Susanne Schultz. 2010. ‘… a certain amount of engineering involved’: Constructing the
public in participatory governance arrangements. Public Understanding of Science 19 (4): 403–419.
Callon, Michel. 1999. The role of lay people in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Science Technology Society 4 (1): 81–94.
Carpini, Delli, Michael, Fay Cook, and Lawrence Jacobs. 2004. Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation and
Citizen Engagement: An Empirical Review of the Literature. Review of Political Science 7: 315–344.
Chambers, S. 2003. Deliberative democratic theory. Annual Review of Political Science 6: 307–326.
Chilvers, Jason, and Matthew Kearnes. (2015). Remaking Participation: Science. In Environment and Emergent
Publics. London: Taylor & Francis.
Clark, Nigel. 2012. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage
Publications.
Colin H. Davidson, Cassidy Johnson, Gonzalo Lizarralde, Nese Dikmen, and Alicia Sliwinski. 2007. Truths and
myths about community participation in post-disaster housing projects. Habitat International 31 (1): 100–
115.
Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower. Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. NY: Cornell
University Press.
Delamaza, Gonzalo. 2005. Tan lejos tan cerca: políticas públicas y sociedad civil en Chile. Santiago: LOM
editores.
Delanty, Gerard. 1997. Models of citizenship: Defining European identity and citizenship. Citizenship Studies 1
(3): 285–303.
Deville, Joe, Guggenheim, Michel, and Hrdličková, Zuzana. 2013. Same but different: Provoking relations,
assembling the comparator. Working Paper, Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP),
Goldsmiths, University of London.
EPA – United States Environmental Protection Agency 2013. Charrettes. Available at http://www.epa.
gov/international/public-participation-guide/Tools/Input/charrette.html (last accessed, 13 December 2018).
Erikson, Kai. 1994. A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community. New York: W.
W. Norton.
Felt, Ulrike, and Maximilian Fochler. 2010. Machineries for making publics: Inscribing and de-scribing publics
in public engagement. Minerva 48: 219–238.
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Girard, Monique and Stark, David. 2007. Socio-technologies of assembly: Sense making and demonstration in
rebuilding lower Manhattan. ISERP working papers 05–09, Institute for Social and Economic Research and
policy, Columbia University.
Gobierno de Chile. 2010. Programa de Reconstrucción Terremoto y Maremoto del 27 de Febrero de 2010.
Santiago: Resumen Ejecutivo.
Gould, K., M. Garcia, and J. Remes. 2016. Beyond "natural-disasters-are-not-natural": the work of state and
nature after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. Journal of Political Ecology 23 (1): 93–114.
Hilgartner, Stephen. 2007. Overflow and containment in the aftermath of disaster. Social Studies of Science 37
(1): 153–158.
Horst, Maja, and Alan Irwin. 2010. Nations at ease with radical knowledge: On consensus, consensuing and false
consensuses. Social Studies of Science 40 (1): 105–126.
Irwin, Alan. 2001. Constructing the scientific citizen: Science and democracy in the biosciences. Public
Understanding of Science 10 (1): 1–18.
Irwin, Alan. 2006. The politics of talk coming to terms with the ‘new’ scientific governance. Social Studies of
Science 36 (2): 299–320.
Jasanoff, Sheila. 1988. The Bhopal disaster and the right to know. Social Science and Medicine 27 (10): 1113–
1123.
Jasanoff, Sheila. 1994. Learning from disaster: risk management after Bhopal. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Kreps, Gary. 1998. Disaster as systemic event and social catalyst. In What is a disaster? Perspectives on the
question, ed. E.L. Quarantelli. New York and London: Routledge.
Lakoff, Andrew, and Stephen Collier. 2010. Infrastructure and Event: The Political Technology of Preparedness.
In Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life, ed. B. Braun and S. Whatmore.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Law, John and Singleton, 2006. A further species of trouble? Disaster and narrative. www.heterogeneities.
net/publications/LawSingleton2006SpeciesOfTrouble.pdf (last accessed December 2018).
Levidow, Les, and Claire Marris. 2001. Science and governance in Europe: Lessons from the case of agricultural
biotechnology. Science and Public Policy 28 (5): 345–360.
Lezaun, Javier, and Nerea Calvillo. 2013. In the political laboratory: Kurt Lewin's atmospheres. Journal of
Cultural Economy 7 (4): 434–457.
Lezaun, Javier, and Linda Soneryd. 2007. Consulting citizens: Technologies of elicitation and the mobility of
publics. Public Understanding of Science 16: 279–297.
Lezaun, Javier, Noortje Marres, and Manuel Tironi. 2016. Experiments in Participation. In Handbook of Science
and Technology Studies, ed. C. Miller, E. Smitt-Doer, U. Felt, and R. Fouche, vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Lichterman, Paul. 2006. Social Capital or Group Style? Rescuing Tocqueville's Insights on Civic Engagement.
Theory and Society 35 (5/6): 529–563.
Lichterman, Paul, and Nina Eliasoph. 2014. Civic Action. American Journal of Sociology 120 (3): 798–863.
Licoppe, C. 2010. The ‘performative turn’ in science and technology studies. Journal of Cultural Economy 3 (2):
181–188.
Lister, R. 1998. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. New York: NYU Press.
MacKenzie, D. 2007. Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets.
In Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, ed. D. Mackenzie, F. Muniesa, and
L. Siu. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Marres, Noortje. 2012. Material Participation. Technology. In the Environment and Everyday Publics. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Marres, Noortje, and Javier Lezaun. 2011. Materials and devices of the public: An introduction. Economy and
Society 40 (4): 489–509.
Marshall, T.H. 1992. Citizenship and social class. In Citizenship and social class, ed. T.H. Marshall and T.
Bottomore. London: Pluto Press.
Méheux, Kirstie, Dale Dominey-Howes, and Kate Lloyd. 2010. Operational challenges to community partici-
pation in post-disaster damage assessments: observations from Fiji. Disasters 34 (4): 1102–1122.
Michael, Mike. 2014. Afterword: on the Topologies and Temporalities of Disaster. The Sociological Review 62
(1S): 236–245.
Michael, Michael. 2009. Publics performing publics: Of PiGs, PiPs and politics. Public Understanding of
Science 18 (5): 617–631.
Mileti, Dennis. 1999. Disasters By Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States.
Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press.
Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. 2010. Minuta Programación de Reconstrucción Territorial, Urbana y
Patrimonial. Santiago.
MINVU, Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. 2010. Plan de Reconstrucción: Chile Unido Reconstruye Mejor.
http://minvu.cl/incjs/download.aspx?glb_cod_nodo=20111122105648&hdd_nom_archivo=Plan%20de%20
Reconstrucci%C3%B3n.pdf. Accessed 17 Jan 2019.
Muniesa, Fabian and Callon, Michael. 2007. BEconomic experiments and the construction of markets.^ In Do
economists make markets? On the performativity of Economics, edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian
Muniesa and Lucia Siu Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Oliver-Smith, A. 1999. ‘What is a disaster?’ Anthropological perspectives on a persistent question. In The Angry
Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, ed. S. Hoffman and A. Oliver-Smith. New York and
London: Routledge.
Oliver-Smith, Anthony. 2002. Theorizing disasters: nature, power, and culture. In Catastrophe and Culture: The
Anthropology of Disaster, ed. S. Hoffman and A. Oliver-Smith. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.
Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susanne Hoffman. 2002. Introduction: Why Anthropologist Should Study Disasters.
In Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, ed. S. Hoffman and A. Oliver-Smith. Santa Fe,
NM: SAR Press.
Pearce, Laurie. 2003. Disaster Management and Community Planning, and Public Participation: How to Achieve
Sustainable Hazard Mitigation. Natural Hazards 28: 211–228.
Pelling, Mark. 2007. Learning from others: the scope and challenges for participatory disaster risk assessment.
Disasters 31 (4): 373–385.
Perry, Ronald. 2005. Disasters, Definitions And Theory Construction. In What is a disaster? New Answers to Old
Questions, ed. R. Perry and E.L. Quarantelli. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation.
Polleta, Francesca. 2002. Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism.
Duke University Press.
PRES Constitución. 2010a. Memoria General. Santiago.
PRES Constitución. 2010b. Plan de Participación Ciudadana. Santiago.
PRES Constitución. 2010c. Official website, www.presconstitucion.cl, last accessed December 2018.
PRES Juan Fernández. 2010. Plan Maestro. AOA public presentation.
PRE Talca. 2011. Informe final. Polis documentation.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Quarantelli, E.L., ed. 1998. What Is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. London: Routledge.
Rojas, David. 2015. Environmental management and open-air experiments in Brazilian Amazonia. Geoforum 66:
136–145.
Rowe, Gene, and Lynn J. Frewer. 2014. Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation. Science,
Technology & Human Values 25 (1): 3–29.
Rydin, Yvonne, and Mark Pennington. 2010. Public Participation and Local Environmental Planning: The
collective action problem and the potential of social capital. Local Environment 5 (2): 153–169.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Comparison as a matter of concern. Common Knowledge 17 (1): 48–63.
Tironi, Manuel. 2014. Atmospheres of indagation: disasters and the politics of excessiveness. Sociological
Review 62 (1): 114–134.
Tironi, Manuel. 2015. Disastrous Publics: Counter-enactments in Participatory Experiments. Science,
Technology, & Human Values 40 (4): 564–587.
Tironi, M., I. Poduje, and N. Somma. 2011. Organizaciones emergentes, participación ciudadana y planificación
urbana: una propuesta de política pública”, in Camino al Bicentenario. Propuestas para Chile 2010.
Santiago: P. Universidad Católica de Chile.
Tironi, Manuel, and Ignacio Farías. 2015. Building a park, immunising life: Environmental management and
radical asymmetry. Geoforum 66: 167–175.
Tironi, M., and I. Rodríguez-Giralt. 2017. Healing, knowing, enduring: Care and politics in damaged worlds.
Sociological Review 65 (2): 89–109.
United Nations Disaster Relief Organization. 1982. Shelter After Disaster. Geneva.
Warner, J., and M.T. Oré. 2006. El Niño platforms: participatory disaster response in Peru. Disasters 30 (1): 102–
117.
Wetmore, Jameson. 2007. Distributing risks and responsibilities: Flood hazard mitigation in New Orleans. Social
Studies of Science 37: 119–126.
Wynne, Brian. 1991. Knowledges in context. Science, Technology and Human Values 16 (1): 111–121.
Wynne, Brian. 1995. Public understanding of science. In Handbook of science and technology studies, ed. S.
Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen, and T. Pinch, 361–388. London: Sage.
Yaneva, Albena. 2012. Mapping controversies in architecture. Farnham: Ashgate.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 2002. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Juan Lama is an architect from Pontificia Universidad Católica. He holds a MSc in Sociology from Pontificia
Universidad Católica and a MSc in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and
Political Science. He is the founder of Hit-Map, where he develops projects at the intersection between social and
urban processess.
Manuel Tironi is an associate professor at the Instituto de Sociología at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,
where he co-convenes the Critical Studies on the Anthropocene group (www.antropoceno.co). He is also
principal investigator at the Center for Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Reduction (CIDIGEN) and at the
Millenium Research Nucleus on Energy and Society (NUMIES). His latest projects have engaged with issues of
geologic modes of knowing, toxicity, environmental justice, and disaster cultures.

TIRONI Distributing Obligations Performing Publ

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

TIRONI Distributing Obligations Performing Publ

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Author's personal copy

Distributing Obligations, Performing Publics: Responsible

Juan Lama 1 & Manuel Tironi 1,2

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Keywords Participation apparatus . Disasters . Performativity . Responsibility . Citizenship

Participation Apparatuses: Public Participation, Performativity

Bringing Publics into Being

conventional sociological accounts, participation, as a subjective disposition, pre-exists

Fig. 1 Participation apparatus

Disasters and the Production of Responsibility

Crafting a Reconstruction Plan: Methods and Cases

One Earthquake, Three Techniques

Foros híbridos were formed by different participants representing different interests of

Fig. 2 Foro Híbrido, 24 June 2010 (PRES Constitución, 2010a)

PRES Juan Fernández

Fig. 3 Charrette (Source: PRES

Fig. 4 Conversación Ciudadana in El Prado, Talca (PRE Talca, 2011)

Conclusions: Epistemic, Decisional and Narrative Responsible Citizens

planning. If responsibility is a moral obligation geared towards the production of a collective

Table 1 Types of responsible publics performed by post-disaster participation apparatuses

Enacted Public Theories Participatory technology Type of responsibility

Epistemic STS, Actor-network Foros Híbridos Voicing opinions and

You might also like