World Town Planning Day on November 8:

The reality of public participation in town planning

by Shalini MARIYATHAS

The entire globe is celebrating the World Town Planning Day on November 8. Sri Lanka, too, has made initiatives to celebrate the occasion with a number of events led by the Institute of Town Planners Sri Lanka, the Young Planners Forum and the University of Moratuwa.

While re-thinking the necessity of town planning on this day, it is very important to ask a question, Does planning really have the capacity to make better places?

We define town planning as fairness, equality and justice that can be delivered through collective actions.

Planning issues

The town planners have clearly understood the planning issues and they have been discussing the spatial issues adequately.

Planning issues and conflicts are becoming increasingly common and unresolved. In light of this condition, what is the justification for planning?

Town planning has a real need in the future. The contribution of planning is going to be more vital for the wellness of our society. Therefore, planners have to work together to establish a genuine belief in the effectiveness of town planning.

The general public should be convinced that planning has a capacity to deliver better outcomes. There has to be wider justification for the profession.

The main necessity for planning is to have something to compare with what really happened. We should be able to demonstrate the beneficial outcomes.

Socially acceptable

We have to remember that planning is a service to the community.

When we prepare development plans for the society we are reporting on the existing conditions, creating a long-term vision for what the society wants, and defining the steps that need to be taken to achieve that vision.

That is simply the planning process. In adopting such a process, the most important element that planners forget or ignore is to make the plans socially acceptable.

Many planners are absorbed by the "business of planning" the implementation and enforcement of the development plans and the utopias, which are not emerged from the context, but borrowed from elsewhere, especially from the so-called international ideas that they rarely have time to focus on how much they give space to regular people's voices.

Most development plans and projects end up collecting dust on shelves because they cannot be realistically implemented.

This is because planners fail to understand the importance of incorporating meaningful public participation in planning and thus, planning fails to offer what society wants.

Public participation

Public participation is a legal requirement in town planning process in Sri Lanka (under the Urban Development Authority Act). The planning agencies carry out the formalistic and bureaucratic process of public hearings in which the agencies end up with comments coming from people from all directions that the agency may or may not respond to in any substantive way.

Open public meetings discourage the informality of collaborative decision-making and public representatives from participating as equals in discussion with private citizens and members of interest groups.

Most often the public meetings discourage busy and thoughtful individuals from spending their time in going through what appear to be.

Such experiences have led to alienation from the political and planning system and contribute to the long-term trend of the public dis-engaging from the participatory processes.

Emerging response

Planners have to find ways to incorporate public opinions away from the traditional hearing procedures. Planners need to find public participatory methods that give more representative and accurate understanding of what the public wants.

We need a participatory planning approach that is interactive and allowing multi-way communication around tasks and issues, involving the public directly with planners and decision makers, and allowing real learning and change to take place on all sides.

There are good public participation practices, for the most part, existing informally. Developing informal partnerships is one model of best public participation in which citizens and public agencies engage in a joint effort to set direction for their community.

This effort is significant as it let the participants to engage directly in conversation with one another and with decision makers.

These are interesting, empowering and sometimes can be seen to have an effect, to actually cause change.

Also, officials get a chance to understand in depth the points of view of their constituents, and citizens and stakeholder groups learn about what is possible and what is not.

Another participatory model that has been adopted by the Western countries and it is largely developed by architects/designers is considered as highly successful is, the charrette. The principle is that new ideas come out of intensive and often collaborative focus around a design problem. Creativity is hardly something that can be achieved through step-by-step procedures.

Various futures

In this model, professionals will assemble a wide array of citizens or other interested parties to look at a place or a site and imagine various futures for it and develop strategies to achieve those futures.

Public agencies, and town planners should decide that it is time to take a proactive role in going out into the community not only to tell them about proposed plans and projects, but more importantly to get community input into the plans and projects before they are fully developed. This is a difficult task because the need is to bring out people who normally would not come to the agency before the issues have become challenging enough.

For this, the planners and professionals may work with local religious places, service organisations and other non-profit organisations which have participants they can bring to meetings. These can serve as dialogues and a two-way learning process before decisions are made.

Follow guidelines

The best way to achieve such a collaborative participatory planning is to develop a set of principles that are relatively easy to follow guidelines so that the planning can be both democratic and influential.

The concluding message is that the Twenty-first-Century Town Planning needs to incorporate, explicitly, the meaningful public involvement in planning.

We must be hard-liners in practicing planning in order for it to be successful. Change in the way we do things is necessary to change things around us.

(The writer is a Lecturer at the Department of Town and Country Planning, University of Moratuwa and the Secretary of Young Planners Forum of the Institute of Town Planners Sri Lanka).