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"... so what?" Limitations of Participatory Design in Design Making in Urban

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Conference Paper · November 2014

DOI: 10.1145/2662155.2662177

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 “… so what?”- Limitations of Participatory Design on
Decision-making in Urban Planning
Mariana Salgado - Aalto University
Michail Galanakis - Helsinki University
ABSTRACT
This article addresses certain Participatory Design (PD)-
related aspects of the project OurCity that took place in
Meri-Rastila, a multicultural suburb in East Helsinki,
Finland. The aim of OurCity was to democratize design
processes and to empower local residents to influence the
redevelopment of their area. PD processes were a key
component to the OurCity project and its activities,
particularly in relation to the process of drafting an
Alternative Master Plan (AMP) for the area. The plan
competed with, and lost by a narrow margin to, the plan
drafted by the Helsinki City Planning Department. The
scope of PD was underestimated because AMP, the
design object, was envisioned in isolation from the
participatory process it entailed. Had PD been presented
as crucial to the process, AMP would have greater
impact. In this article, we argue that it is necessary to
make PD processes more visible in the end products of
participatory planning. We base this argument on
firsthand experience as members of the OurCity team and
on an analysis of printed media and digital texts.
Author Keywords
PD, immigrants, social inclusion, planning, grassroots.
INTRODUCTION
In our increasingly diverse cities, deciding on issues
important to the common good is no easy task. This is
particularly true of urban planning, where supposedly
universal ideals have been challenged (Hracs and
Massam, 2008). The ways different people conceive,
perceive and experience city space as common ground
differ. Hracs and Massam (ibid) demonstrate that civic
conversations are vital to negotiating ideas and values.
Planning has the potential to bring people together and
negotiate (Forester, 2000; Sandercock, 2003). In addition,
a coalition formed for physical and social planning has
significant potential in terms of the development of an
intercultural milieu (Sandercock and Attili, 2009). In such
coalitions, different people and groups build bridges of
communication and understanding in continuous and
sometimes contentious negotiations. PD facilitates the
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2662155.2662177
5
building of spaces for civic conversations and creates
conditions for intercultural understanding. Recent studies
have investigated the use of PD in urban planning and in
the design of interactive systems in order to facilitate
public participation (Hornecker et al, 2002; Botero &
Saad-Sulonen 2010; Bratteteig & Wagner 2012).
The Finnish Land Use and Building Act (Ministry of
Environment, 1999) stipulates that city planners have to
consult citizens. In most cases, the City Planning
Department (CPD) initiates and dominates the
consultation processes, which are envisioned as
demonstrations of pre-determined plans in which only a
few residents participate and give feedback. The planning
process does not afford citizens the possibility to
contribute ideas to the project at its early phases (Saad-
Sulonen, Botero & Kuutti, 2012), or to work on a
grassroots level. Leikila, Fahenle & Galanakis (2013:
187-8) demonstrate that urban planning processes in
Helsinki have difficulty addressing the demands that arise
with increasing ethnocultural diversity.
The members of the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2662155.2662177
OurCity team worked for grassroots participation in the
early stage of the urban planning process by conducting
workshops open to local residents. OurCity shares values
and visions with previous participatory urban projects
that empowered marginalized citizens to influence their
living environment (Yan-Chi Kwok, 2004). OurCity
adhered to the political agenda that PD started in the 70s
(Ehn, 1988) by voicing democratic arguments in favor of
inclusion in the planning process. We agree with
Björgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren (2012) who demonstrate
that PD facilitates agonistic democracy and inclusion of
marginal voices. Additionally, we value the context-based
– rather than the abstract – theorization of PD. In this
light, Meri-Rastila was the focus area for the OurCity
project because, despite the opposition of local residents,
the City Planning Department of Helsinki (CPD) was
planning to build a new housing area that would destroy
one fourth of the local forestland.
THE CASE OF OURCITY
In 2012, an independent team of experts – including
architects, designers and community workers of various
nationalities – got together to organize OurCity in Meri-
Rastila. The mother tongue of some 28.7% of the area’s
residents is a language other than Finnish. This
percentage is much higher than in the rest of Helsinki
(Helsinki kuntarekisteri: Facta 2012). Meri-Rastila has
been stigmatized in the past because of Somalis living
there (Galanakis, 2008). OurCity team recognized a great
opportunity for civic conversation to flourish in this area.
One of the aims of OurCity was to enable immigrant
residents of Meri-Rastila who are rarely heard to voice
their views on the planning of their living environments.
The team approached local stakeholders, negotiated
collaborations, and commenced discussions that revolved
around the urban space. However, other issues, regarding
for instance the accessibility to services, surfaced as well
(Fuad-Luke, 2012).
Pro Meri-Rastila – an association of local residents –
defended the local forestland by lobbying and organizing
public meetings and candle-lit marches to protest and to
spread their ideas about the future of the area. They also
held meetings with city planners to discuss plans for the
future. Pro Meri-Rastila members quickly recognized the
opportunity OurCity presented and asked for help to
devise a master plan that would serve as an alternative to
the one presented by city planners, a plan capable of
accommodating 2000 new residents while leaving the
forestland unscathed. OurCity accepted the request for
help and, therefore, we argue that the Alternative Master
Plan (AMP) was a citizen-driven initiative. OurCity
stipulated that the plan be drafted as part of a
participatory design process that included immigrants and
other less engaged local residents.
Immigrant residents of Meri-Rastila were fond of the
forestland and didn’t want to see it destroyed.
Notwithstanding, their engagement in the planning
discussion was highly problematic (Leikila, Fahenle &
Galanakis, 2013). Two architects from the OurCity team
supervised a larger design team of university students in
its effort to devise an AMP for Meri-Rastila. We
conducted a series of PD workshops with local residents.
In conjunction with the AMP design team, we analyzed
the results of the workshops in order to inform the
drafting of the plan. Thus, the AMP represented the
voices of a wider group of residents. Once the plan was
ready, OurCity members decided to let the Pro Meri-
Rastila group adopt it as its own and present it to the City
Planning Board (CPB) for evaluation.
The AMP was presented to the CPB as an alternative to
the plan proposed by the city. The CPB voted five to four
in favor of the proposal put forth by the city planners
(City Planning Board, 2012). Later on, the Finnish
National Innovation Fund (Sitra) financed a comparative
analysis of the environmental impact of the two
proposals. Even though that analysis favored the AMP
(Savisalo et al, 2013), the CPB voted again in favor of the
city planners’ proposals and the AMP was rejected (City
Planning Board, 2012b). Nevertheless, CPD experts were
instructed to draft a new version of their plan that
preserved the forest as a recreational area. In this context
we ask how the media, the authorities, and active
bloggers perceived the participation of local residents,
including immigrants, in the AMP. We ask how this
participatory process influenced decision-making. It is
with these questions in mind that we describe the process
and present its results.
OURCITY AND PD WORKSHOPS
OurCity members were invited to participate in events
and to organize others involving local residents (OurCity
6
blog, 2012). In this paper, we discuss three workshops
geared to informing residents about the design of the
AMP. Participants in the first workshop were the 15
members of Pro Meri-Rastila. In the second workshop,
we worked with seventeen 5th grade students and their
teacher in the local school. Approximately half of the
students had a multicultural background. The third
workshop was an open invitation to all the neighbors and
community workers. Open invitations, however, did not
prove to be enough. We extended special invitations to
local immigrant groups and associations. We contracted a
translator so that a group of Somali women could take
part in a workshop that ultimately included 35
participants. The aims of the first three workshops were
to encourage participants to be creative and playful using
clay, Lego, and wood pieces while envisioning possible
scenarios for Meri-Rastila; to facilitate a discussion on
the proposals generated by local autochthonous and
immigrant residents; to build relationships with residents
that could eventually inform the design of AMP. In the
fourth workshop, eight members of the AMP design team
analyzed the data retrieved from the previous workshops,
such as videos, photos and audio material, and presented
their findings. The idea of urban in-filling1 emerged from
these workshops and it became the key design concept for
the AMP. In-filling was a sound strategy for antagonizing
the official city plan. Under in-filling, the bulk of the new
housing proposed by the City planners would also be
maintained in the AMP, the neighborhood would become
more densely populated, spaces for possible new services
would be preserved, and existing service networks would
be unencumbered. Crucially, the forestland would be
protected.
The workshops were particularly useful at the beginning
of the planning process. At that stage, active residents
were not the only ones that could express their opinions;
the process welcomed those who had never joined in a
public discussion. Somali women in the workshop
expressed their need for a large community center to host
their parties and gatherings; these requests were
accommodated by the AMP. The workshops allowed the
participating residents to be active players in the various
stages of the design process. This is evident in the way
that residents defended the AMP in the media (both in
blogs discussions and in letters to newspapers). We argue
that the main advantages of AMP were the preservation
of the forestland and the PD processes that engaged local
residents.
PARTICIPATION TRIVIALIZED
Over the course of the OurCity project, we retrieved a
total of 32 articles from the printed media that discussed
the plans proposed for Meri-Rastila. For the purpose of
this article, we reviewed 23 print media articles, 6 major
blogposts, the actual document of the Alternative Master
Plan, and the CPB resolutions. The blogposts were
1
In-filling is a process of densification where the optimal use of free or
underused land within a built area is preferred to developing adjoining
rural or green areas. In-filling is extensively discussed in literature on
urban development that is out of the scope of this article.
selected because local residents actively commented on
them (218 comments were gathered in the 6 posts). We
analyzed this material with two questions in mind: Was
discussion generated around the PD process and how was
this process described?
Twenty-eight percent of the articles valued citizens’
participation. Only a few of the articles or the comments
on the blogposts mentioned that immigrants were
involved in drafting the AMP. Four articles mentioned
that immigrants participated in the proposal but only one
of them was in Finnish. The title in English of this article
would have been “Lanterns and Lego for the forest. Meri-
Rastila people walk in the woods and do craft on behalf
of the forest.” In that text, the facilitator of the workshop
was referred to as the “craft leader”, though this was not
an art & craft event. The same article mentioned the
participation of Somali women, but it did so anecdotally
rather than reading that participation as a positive sign of
social inclusion (Hakkarainen & Vanninen, 2012). On
these grounds, we conclude that the participatory methods
we put into practice were poorly presented.
Neither the CPB nor the media highlighted the value of
the AMP as a proposal that entailed a democratic
planning process. In the material we reviewed, the AMP
was considered important first and foremost because it
protected forestland (70%), then because it encouraged
citizen participation (45%), and finally because the
makeup of the OurCity team was multicultural (10%).
When the authors of the above sources referred to the
background of the members of the OurCity project team,
they were called “international”; the foreign residents of
Meri Rastila, on the other hand, were referred to as
“immigrants”. Of a total of 218 comments written in
response to the six blogposts, 25% discussed the AMP in
terms of the benefit of protecting the forest; only 2,7%
addressed the proposal in terms of the merit of
representing local residents; none of the comments
referred to the fact that this was a process involving
immigrant residents. The AMP effectively described the
planning proposal in architectural drawings and in a 39-
page written report.2 The participatory design process
involving residents is described on page eight of that
document. It appears that this did not suffice to
communicate to the authorities and the wider public the
value of the participation of local residents, especially of
immigrants, in the planning process.
Shuler and Namioka (1993) argue that people who are
affected by a decision or event should have the
opportunity to influence it. For this to occur, society
needs to openly advocate participation. In addition,
participatory efforts engaging different stakeholders must
be evident in the end-results insofar as they have an
impact on decision-making. OurCity forged a
participatory process in which autochthonous and
immigrant residents voiced their concerns. This
participatory phase was not acknowledged or discussed
once the design object, in this case the AMP, was
2
http://meidankaupunki.wordpress.com/alternative-master-plan/a3-
book-and-exhibition-panels/
7
finalized. We argue, therefore, that the design object was
envisioned in relative isolation from the participatory
process it entailed.
DISCUSSION
There are many reasons why the PD process was
perceived as detached from the final design object. One
may be the failure to represent more efficaciously how
citizens’ participation and the end-product are interlinked;
another could be that designers who are not trained in PD
have trouble appreciating it. In our view, this is
particularly true of architects and urban planners. Indeed,
it may not be unfair to say that underestimating residents’
participation in the AMP is indicative of traditional
planning practices still at work (see Scott-Brown, 2009).
We acknowledge as well that reciprocity and trust
between all stakeholders involved in the PD processes
would have required more time than the predetermined
one-year period granted to OurCity project. Furthermore,
while we allocated great effort to the PD process and
community engagement, we failed to adequately defend
residents’ participation in the crucial decisions of the
AMP. Eventually, the PD process, as well as its impact
on the drafting of the AMP, was played down.
It may well be asked, then, what the point of citizens’
participation is when that participation is barely
acknowledged and when the power distribution that it
requires seems unattainable. We praise PD within like-
minded circles of advocates. However, in many cases the
wider public and the authorities still perceive PD as a
benevolent gesture, rather than as an integral design
process. When stripped of its mandate, PD does not affect
decision-making. We argue that this is unfortunate for the
grassroots involved. Hence, we propose the use of special
ISO standard3 labels certifying projects involving PD.
This would allow people to corroborate that a project of
any sort, from urban development to industrial
production, makes use of PD processes that truly engage
end-users.
CONCLUSIONS
The fact that the AMP was a proposal instigated by
residents and devised in collaboration with some local
residents was undermined by the concern with
preservation of the forestland. Ideally, those two
components would reinforce one another. With the AMP,
OurCity project affected the decision-making process. We
achieved our goal of providing an example in which
citizens and independent professionals generated and
implemented new ideas. In addition, we agree with
Nuojua et al (2008) that new methods for public
participation are needed in order to make urban planning
processes more democratic. Methods are also required to
render participatory processes visible at all stages of
decision-making in urban planning.
There are many ways for designers to present their final
results. Perspective and aerial views, scale drawings and
3
International Organization for Standardization
 models, and digital renderings, all serve to describe the
proposals in terms of final outcome. However, none of
those representations grasps PD processes and the
richness, as well as the messiness, grassroots participation
brings. There is evidence that certain methods of mapping
promote public involvement in decision-making (Latour
et al, 1992; Sieber, 2006). If PD were to be incorporated
convincingly in urban planning, it would greatly benefit
from these mapping methods. Unfortunately, in
traditional urban planning PD processes remain
underestimated and therefore representing such processes
is deemed unnecessary. Amidst this climate, as designers,
we need to reformulate our visualization tools to
demonstrate PD processes in the end-result. The use of a
PD ISO standard label would imply an added value
attached to a master plan that would be instigated by, and
drafted with, local residents. Responsible decision-
making by cities requires planning processes that are
more informed of citizens’ needs and that require
citizens’ participation. It is therefore, time for PD
advocates in urban planning to gain some sisu (Finnish
for perseverance) and become more brazen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank all our participants in Meri-Rastila and
our colleagues at the OurCity project. We are grateful to
the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 for endorsing
this project. Last but not least, we thank the Academy of
Finland (Decision No 137954).
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