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New roles of community participation: from the right to resist towards partnership building

Like the private sector, communities are not homogenous entities. Consequently, there are multiple ways of involving people in a development process, which can be more or less appropriate to given situations.

Generally speaking, community involvement is about bringing in those who have a 'stake' in the neighbourhood – those who live there, those who work there and those who are the owners and customers of local businesses and services. Participation can mean taking part in the design of a development programme and/or taking part in its implementation. It can also mean taking over responsibility for parts of the regeneration process. In general, one aim of all participation efforts is to empower the community.

In the integrated neighbourhood-based approaches we looked at, community participation plays a crucial positive role. This is in marked contrast to earlier forms of participation. Participation used to mean the right of people to defend their space against change and (mainly public planning) intervention. Today, 'civil society' is seen as an increasingly important resource for a development process which can bring in additional knowledge and (both social and financial) capital.

The scale and intensity of community participation varies across the cities and their constituent neighbourhoods. We identified different kinds of participation, emerging at different scales, and at different levels of intensity. Representative involvement tends to occur at the macro-level (the level where decisions about the whole process are taken) – the presence of a relatively small number of local residents on advisory boards etc. Participatory involvement tends to occur at the meso level (of smaller groups of people, say 20-30) – in most cities, there are examples for 'one-off' participatory democratic exercises like a neighbourhood jury or planning for real activities. Client involvement tends to occur at the microlevel (of single persons) when individual actors come in, for instance home owners.

The spectrum of participation ranges from the active agency on the part of the community to a rather restricted consultative role depending on the form of interaction negotiated between the actors concerned. In this spectrum, we found that most cities range somewhere between these poles in their approach. This middle ground can be described as a hybrid model based on collaborative relations to key stakeholders, whilst there are single examples for activist and consultative models within each scheme as well.

Throughout the cases, we could see that successful efforts to involve the community are tailored to local circumstances and usually involve an empowering element. Successful involvement, then, seems to be based on sharing power and responsibility and on trust. Individuals and groups with clear interests and demands, but also with certain skills and capacity are increasingly being brought into urban regeneration schemes.