Participatory planning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (June 2007)

Participatory planning is an urban planning paradigm which emphasises involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning.

1 Article
2 See also
3 References

[edit] Article

[edit] Origins

In the UN Habitat document Building Bridges Through Participatory Planning, Fred Fisher, president of the International Development Institute for Organization and Management, identifies Participatory Reflection And Action (PRA) as the leading school of participatory planning. He identifies Paulo Freire and Kurt Lewin as key pioneers, as well as claiming planning fathers Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford as participatory planners. Friere’s belief that poor and exploited people can and should be enabled to analyse their own reality was a fundamental inspiration for the participatory planning movement. Lewin’s relevance lay in his integration of democratic leadership, group dynamics, experiential learning, action research and open systems theory, and his efforts to overcome racial and ethnic injustices.

[edit] Principles

Robert Chambers, considered by Fisher as a leading icon for the movement, defines PRA according to the following principles;

Handing over the stick (or pen or chalk): facilitating investigation, analysis, presentation and learning by local people themselves, so they generate and own the outcomes and also learn.
Self-critical awareness: facilitators continuously and critically examine their own behaviour.
Personal responsibility: taking responsibility for what is done rather than relying, for instance, on the authority of manuals or on rigid rules.
Sharing: which involves the wide range of techniques now available, from chatting across the fence to photocopies and e-mail. 5