One of the things that comes up in my research is HOW participation in urban planning might look. I worked with a lot of urban planners in SG who desperately wanted citizens and residents to ‘participate’, but because the idea of what participation would be was underdeveloped, had a really hard time getting good engagement. People either didn’t want to because they didn’t see the point, or would basically troll the planners hehe.
So potential research questions abound. My work is trying to ask/show a) how people are ALREADY participating, if you pay enough attention (to participation as interacting with the city itself, not just as responding to a feedback questionnaire or coming to sessions structured by interests of the planners) and b) how we can incorporate that kind of participation into planning.
It’s not enough to just say “citizens should be more active” – more work has to go into imagining how they might want to participate and how this is already happening. We have to get more creative in imagining participatory design processes (which is why this project is really cool, @jakobskote!)