Methods of engagement: On civic participation formats as composition devices in urban planning Open Access

This article evaluates and develops the contribution of pragmatic sociology to the study of urban life and politics, by way of analysing recent shifts in the cultural-political forms of civic participation in formal urban planning. In doing so, it seeks to stage a critical test of the diagnosis of a ‘certified’, (neo-)liberal city that has recently emerged from work with Laurent Thévenot’s sociology of engagements and commonalities. Drawing on extensive empirical materials on the methods and formats of civic participation in contemporary Danish urban planning, we identify three dominant civic participation formats: the hearing, the dialogue meeting, and the workshop. These formats, we argue, work as composition devices that stabilise certain figures of the urban (quasi-)’citizen’, endowed with circumscribed possibilities for political engagement. Rather than a monolithic process of ‘certification’, we conclude, recent years have witnessed a partial and contested translation of the urban citizen into more manageable, liberal shapes.

When it comes to understanding and rethinking the multiple tensions in urban life, activism, and politics, pragmatic sociology has already begun to prove itself a highly valuable resource (e.g. Breviglieri, 2013; Holden & Scerri, 2014; Luhtakallio, 2012). Laurent Thévenot’s work on a sociology of engagements, in particular, has enabled an integrated analysis of varied urban practices and concerns, ranging from the most personal and familiar attachments to the most publicly legitimate forms of critique and justification. In this way, new questions have been raised as to how commonality (‘in the plural’) is achieved in the city through contested cultural and political processes of compromise and composition (e.g. Blok, 2015; Blok & Meilvang, 2015). So far, however, few dedicated attempts have been made to bring this analytical approach to bear on the specific governing arrangements, forms of power and modes of composition characteristic of contemporary urban planning. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by way of inquiring into, and further theorising, the place of civic participation methods and formats in urban planning processes.

Over the past 40 years or so, urban planning in liberal democracies in Europe and beyond has increasingly focused on involving ordinary citizens in the development of urban solutions, thereby reacting to critiques of prior technocratic tendencies. In this sense, civic participation in urban planning has become a site of multiple tensions over the design of processes for the expression of democratic voice in the city. This ‘turn to participation’ has received substantial attention from scholars of city planning, analysing these new developments from within different theoretical traditions and to more-or-less specific practical effects (for general discussions and overviews, see Campbell & Marshall, 2000; Forester, 2006; Healey, 1996; Lane, 2005; Silver, Scott, & Kazepov, 2010). Taken together, this literature has contributed greatly to the understanding of civic participation practices in urban planning. However, partly as a result of prior analytical commitments, the specific and diverse methods and formats that facilitate participation and allow for differentiated forms of civic voice arguably still remains under-explored. In this article, based on extensive empirical material, we argue that the pragmatic sociology of engagement and commonality-making facilitates such a more fine-grained analysis.

To date, most studies of participation in urban planning analyse either specific citizen-involvement processes (Hernández-Medina, 2010) or specific sites of participation, such as sustainability indicator systems (Holden, 2010) or urban regeneration projects.¹ In doing so, studies roughly tend to pertain to – or sometimes to juxtapose (Pløger, 2004) – one of three analytical frameworks, which provide the assumptions and criteria for evaluating the success or otherwise of participatory processes. First, a ‘Habermasian’ literature emphasises deliberative democracy as the rationale and ideal of participation, whereby communicative rationality will lead to a consensus on the principles and goals of planning (Healey, 1996; Melo & Baiocchi, 2006). Second, in a ‘Foucauldian’ literature, the realistic and desirable outcome of participation is to bring different ideas, positions, and interests together through conflict-ridden and antagonistic processes, beyond any possibility of consensus (Pløger, 2001; Purcell, 2009). Third, and in a somewhat different vein, a ‘neo-Marxist’ literature highlights the inherent democratic deficit in urban civic participation processes due to a neoliberal, technocratic, and hence ‘post-political’ turn in urban planning since the 1980s (Paddison, 2009; Swyngedouw, Moulaert, & Rodriguez, 2002).

As has been shown in the related but different context of transnational governance (Cheyns, 2014), pragmatic-sociological tools may cast significantly different light on the use and effect of participation formats in various political settings. Here, importantly, Thévenot’s (2007, 2014) conceptual architecture allows one to highlight a different set of tensions, structured less around a general axis from consensus to conflict, and more around the differing institutionalised formats of engagement through which actors achieve variable capacities for political questioning and the building of shared moral-political commitments. By way of a case study into currently dominant formats of participation in Danish urban planning, we seek in this article to show how such an approach opens the way to a more nuanced appreciation of the variable formats of civic urban participation – and, in turn, to an understanding of these formats as implicated in wider cultural-political and historical processes of ordering the very space of civic politics in cities. As such, rather than studying urban planning in all its aspects, our point will be that pragmatic sociology allows us to take its shifting deployments of specific methods and formats for civic participation as an important entrance to wider questions of urban democracy.

More specifically, our suggestion in this article is that civic participation methods act as core devices in what Thévenot (2014) calls ‘the art of composition’ at work in formal urban planning. As such, rethinking participation in urban planning via the concepts of engagement regimes and commonality in the plural allows us to analyse different formats of participation, not primarily as more or less ‘successful’ (according to some pre-set ideal), but as plural ways of organising the expression of citizen voice and hence the urban-political space of agreement-reaching and legitimate differing. Formats of participation, we argue, assume, and impose, specific combinations – or compositions – of legitimate urban engagements and commonalities, cut out from what is in effect an endless array of proximate differences in how people dwell in and co-inhabit the city and its localities. By studying empirically the range and dominance of such formats at work in contemporary urban planning, this article aims to provide a solid grounding from which to assess the scope for political voicing thus afforded and legitimated, on the one hand, and the various tensions and exclusions simultaneously imposed, on the other hand.

In analytical terms, we suggest, this inquiry allows us to interrogate and extend Thévenot’s concept of composition, by way of what we dub ‘composition devices’. As illustrated by the methods and formats of participation in urban planning, this heuristic concept is meant to bring attention to how particular combinations of multiple engagements and forms of commonality are achieved and given stability in specific institutional contexts – and how, in this case, they become part of the arrangements or dispositifs of governing. In doing so, we seek to engage in conversation on the way in which, informed by pragmatic sociology, other studies emphasise the contemporary dominance in participatory settings of a specific liberal grammar of commonality (Cheyns, 2014; Silva-Castañeda, 2012), tied also to processes of standardisation and certification that impose a narrow version of planned engagements by self-interested individuals. To what extent does contemporary urban planning, as seen from its participation formats, exhibit traits of such a ‘government through objectives’ (e.g. Thévenot, 2009, 2011a, 2015)? What kind of ‘citizen’, in the end, is allowed to emerge in the arrangements and dispositifs of urban planning and participation?

In the next section, we outline in more detail how the pragmatic sociology of engagements has opened up new avenues for inquiring into urban politics, including in giving rise to a historical diagnostic of the so-called certified city (Breviglieri, 2013). We then turn to outline the methodology of our study, before setting out our empirical analysis, in which we distil and discuss three overarching formats of participation as the most widely used in contemporary Danish planning. In the discussion and conclusion, we return to the question of how this finding, together with our notion of composition devices, allows us to nuance the view of participatory formats as key sites of urban politics and its historical shifts.

The city and its politics has been a field of interest in sociology and cognate disciplines at least since Simmel and the Chicago School sociologists first theorised and analysed the social forms characteristic of urban life. Since then, a richly varied and increasingly cross-disciplinary conversation has opened up in urban studies, drawing analytical inspiration, as noted, from theoretical developments in social and political theory. Broadly speaking, such conversations since the 1970s have tended to be heavily infused with neo- and post-Marxist commitments, from the hopeful analysis of ‘urban social movements’ (Castells, 1983) as markers of alternative urbanisms in the 1970s and 1980s to an increasingly critical diagnostics of neoliberal hegemony, gentrification, social exclusions, and ‘post-political’ tendencies of technocratic rule (Harvey, 1989; Swyngedouw et al., 2002). This, then, is the context in which a small but growing community of scholars have recently turned to pragmatic sociology as a source of new analytical inspiration for the study of urban life, activism, and politics (e.g. Albertsen & Diken, 2001; Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Breviglieri, 2013; Holden & Scerri, 2014; Luhtakallio, 2012; Pattaroni & Baitsch, 2015).

This emerging literature can be usefully divided into three main strands, corresponding to different phases and emphases in the elaboration of pragmatic sociology. First, a number of recent studies of urban development, government, and planning make use of the framework from On Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006 [1991]), in order to show that practices and processes of critique, justification, and compromise are integral to the unfolding of urban planning as a power-laden yet uncertain situation (Fuller, 2012; Holden & Scerri, 2014). Diverse urban actors, from planners, experts and developers to activists and local associations, are shown to engage in more-or-less conflict-ridden interactions, in which their different ‘orders of worth’ collide. As grammars of legitimate urban arrangements drawn upon by actors in situations of conflict, such orders – including, not least, the ‘civic’ worth of collective interests and solidarity, the ‘industrial’ worth of effectiveness and expert rationality, and the ‘market’ worth of monetary gain – both structure urban planning conflicts and give rise to new compromises. Overall, in their diagnostic ambition, these studies highlight how market and industrial forms of worth tend to dominate contemporary urban planning in European contexts, although often in ways that articulate compromises with a shifting set of further orders of worth (such as civic, opinion, and green), giving rise also to contextual variability.

The second strand of work follows Thévenot’s subsequent elaboration on regimes of engagement (e.g. 2007), in order to show how people in urban settings engage with their surroundings beyond or ‘below’ the level of public critique and justification. In particular, studies have drawn on the distinction of familiar, planned, and justifiable engagements to open up a contextually sensitive approach to the cultural and political work of urban activists (e.g. Breviglieri, 2013; Luhtakallio, 2012). This includes, not least, the often-crucial roles that more familiar and habitual engagements with specific places and neighbourhoods play in facilitating communal identities and mobilisations amongst activist groups. Similarly, in our own previous work, we have shown how familiar attachments to the city’s green spaces may be crucial in analysing how planning encroachments spur inhabitants into ad hoc and ‘coincidental’ forms of urban-environmental activism, giving rise to small but critical counter-publics (Blok & Meilvang, 2015). In short, work now exists to suggest the considerable value of the sociology of engagements to a broader project of rethinking urban activism and politics within an encompassing comparative framework.

Third, a handful of scholars close to the elaboration of Thévenot’s intellectual project – notably Marc Breviglieri and Luca Pattaroni – have sought to advance a more explicitly diagnostic approach to historical shifts in dominant urban-political orders, expressed in the language of a pragmatic sociology of commonality. Drawing inspiration from collective work on how policy-making in other domains (social policy, biomedicine, and so on) increasingly takes the form of a ‘government through objectives’ (Thévenot, 2009, 2011a, 2015), Breviglieri (2013) thus suggests that what we have witnessed since the 1980s is the rise of ‘the certified city’. Put briefly, this implies a situation in which the dominant urban order is guaranteed through a liberal composition of well-controlled and tamed ‘diversity’. As such, contemporary urban governance upholds a strict protection of private property and imposes criteria of political legitimacy that require urban actors to weaken the expression of strong convictions and personal attachments into (mere) opinions and flexible identities (see also Pattaroni & Baitsch, 2015, p. 128; Thévenot, 2015, p. 215).

As concerns urban planning, the argument of a certified city suggests, as noted, that cities in Europe (and possibly beyond) are increasingly ordered through a form of local government that relies on measurable objectives and indicators whose evaluation works through cadres of certification agencies, consultants, and experts. Of immediate importance to our study, such certification is said to pertain also to those official citizen participation procedures that are deployed within urban planning – procedures that, on this view, would be strictly controlled by urban experts and enforce a view of urban inhabitants as weakly tied autonomous individuals fit for the liberal city order (Pattaroni & Baitsch, 2015, p. 132). In short, this argument implies that urban planning is subject to similar forms of exclusion and oppression to those uncovered by Thévenot and others in the context of transnational governance arrangements in the European Union and beyond (Cheyns, 2014), based on the dominance of the liberal grammar of commonality and its combination with a mode of ‘governing through standards’ and other planned engagements.

In this article, we take the diagnosis of the certified city as a credible and interesting hypothesis; one whose value has been demonstrated in studies of urban activism, but which remains to be interrogated at the level of historical and cultural-political shifts and variations in urban planning. Empirically, our aim in the study here is to commence such an interrogation, drawing on broad-based materials from contemporary urban planning in the Northern-European welfare-state context of Denmark, and taking participatory devices and formats as our empirical focus. Such an entry-point, we argue, provides an interesting and challenging case for the diagnosis of a certified city. After all, since the turn to participation in the 1960s, urban planning acts as a contested setting in which legitimacy hinges on being able, on the part of authorities, planners, and experts, to foster and document the (supposedly) democratic self-expression of urban dwellers. This governing arrangement arguably hinges on casting urbanites in (at least) a double capacity, as urban inhabitants attached to specific places and localities in the city (familiar engagement) and as citizens with a right to political participation in the name of the common good (civic justification). It is thus far from obvious, prima facie, how such a composite situation could be rendered ‘certifiable’ in the first place.

This is where our notion of the methods of participation become crucial: throughout, we work on the assumption that the importance of such devices lies in the active work by which they (partially) transpose and transform other ‘background’ urban engagements – which arguably give meaning to the endeavour – into the engagement regime of the plan, consistent with the wider process of urban planning. As such, these settings, as organised by urban authorities and experts, perform key roles as ‘composition devices’, channelling and bounding legitimate citizen voicing. At the same time, however, this leads us also to expect that tensions will remain to this ‘government through composition’ (as it were). Tensions may be situated not just within but also, and crucially, between different regimes of engagement and grammars of commonality, given that all of these must somehow be kept in view in order for participation to achieve its own objectives.

A corollary of this is the idea that urban planning works not through one, but rather through a limited diversity of dominant participation formats, each performing somewhat different compositions of urban citizens and their commonalities. Hence, unlike the way statistics inform and co-produce state and other policies in historically changing but uniform ways (Thévenot, 2011b), the ‘investments in form’ (Thévenot, 1984) at work in urban participation formats, we hypothesise, will likely enact somewhat less standardised and more open-ended varieties of ‘quasi-certified’ citizens. It is to the study of this limited diversity of participatory formats, as well as their historical layering and shifts, that our empirical work is oriented.

While we seek to remain sensitive to the history of urban planning in the particular national context of Denmark, a full exposition of the many comparative and analytical challenges involved in such a situated approach is beyond the scope of our inquiry. Nevertheless, one immediate methodological challenge relates to the way the turn to participation is frequently said to coincide with a number of parallel (and partly co-constituent) shifts in the organisational forms of urban planning, related to wider economic and socio-political changes in Western Europe. Hence, since the 1980s, vocabularies of ‘network governance’ (Sehested, 2009) and ‘meta-urbanism’ (Ascher, 2000) encapsulate the notion of contemporary cities as sites of flexible and sequential project-based planning, organised in shifting networks across public–private boundaries rather than through the hierarchical master plans of the 1950s. In this process, the very meaning and practice of ‘participation’ allegedly shifts, as the realisation of urban projects now results from planners routinely engaging a multiplicity of different ‘stakeholders’, including those of investors, builders, interest groups, voluntary associations, and ordinary citizens. To achieve our diagnostic aims, then, we need a methodology both comprehensive and flexible enough to bring the attendant shifts in participatory formats into analytical focus.

From the point of view of pragmatic sociology, it seems reasonable to link these claims about wider shifts in planning organisation to what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005 [1999]) have dubbed the new spirit of capitalism. Across many private–public urban planning settings, creating, and sustaining, ‘projective worth’ in the shape of temporary networks and projects has become a common mode of moral-political justification. At the same time, however, representative municipal councils retain final democratic responsibility for planning, and municipal authorities still play key coordinating roles, including in setting up both formal and informal participation procedures, not least in a relatively strong and decentralised governance context such as the Danish one (Sehested, 2009, p. 249). What this implies is that contemporary urban planning and participation processes in Denmark potentially span a wide range of settings and actors, from municipal administrations to private consultancies and non-governmental organisations, often working together within shifting and project-based network constellations. Given this heterogeneity – which is also of a geographical and spatial kind, even in the context of a small country like Denmark – how does one study participatory processes with the aim of generating a balanced overview of the different formats of participation broadly at work in this context?

The answer we develop in this study is to use a form of document analysis, built from a process of collecting and analysing a large corpus of Danish urban planning documents pertaining to contemporary participatory methods, projects, and processes (229 documents in total). While not ‘representative’ in the standard statistical sense, this mapping of official planning documents has been set up as broadly ‘proportional’ to the wider national field of organisations, experts, knowledges and participatory methods, and practices, allowing us to make assertions about the relative dominance or marginality of various participatory formats in the institutionalised Danish urban planning culture.² Overall, this procedure takes advantage of the fact that, to a large extent, formal urban planning is a culture of documents (Pløger, 2001), in that documents are produced, circulated, and amended at all stages in the process of planning the city. As ‘paradigmatic artifacts of modern knowledge practices’ (Riles, 2006), documents in both their physical and electronic forms are thus ubiquitous mediators of urban planning processes, and as such play a crucial role in organising, framing, and contesting urban life (McFarlane, 2011, p. 77), including as this happens in and via participatory formats.

Seen this way, the production of documents on civic participation events and procedures in urban planning is not simply a matter of gathering ‘neutral’ information on the values and interests of city inhabitants. Rather, in the language of pragmatic sociology, documents may be viewed as ‘qualified’ things that materialise, and hence lend a certain institutional solidity towards, specific orders of worth, regimes of engagement and grammars of commonality. As reference points in further planning processes, documentations of participatory events and methods thus also serve to express judgments, on the part of their sponsors, of legitimate types of situational engagement and commonality. As such, this kind of document may be conceptualised in terms of textual fixations of certain spaces of legitimate urban engagement. And while the textual fixations may diverge in various ways from the embodied engagements to which they refer and which they help prescribe, they point towards, and partly help to solidify, those wider institutional investments in participatory formats that hold our analytic interest. Thus, in ways not feasible through more embodied methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, such a broad-based analysis of documents circulating widely in Danish urban planning and participation settings allows us to test and challenge the (meso-)historical diagnosis of the rise of a ‘certified city’.

Given the empirical objective to gain a workable overview of the nation-wide field of civic participation in Danish urban planning, our approach entails reading across a wide range of divergent participatory processes, in an attempt to distil emergent patterns of similarity and variation in participatory formats. As such, and as already noted, it abstracts from any attempt to analyse specific participatory processes in their full-length, convoluted trajectory and situated material and political dimensions. For such analyses, we contend, ethnographic and other close observation methods would indeed be preferable; yet, such methods would fail to achieve the sense of overview that our approach allows. Moreover, while the documents we analyse are of contemporary origin, many make explicit reference to the kinds of meso-historical change – that is, changes happening over the past 30–40 years – that are integral to those claims around ‘network governance’ and the ‘certified city’ that hold our interest. As such, while falling short of a full historical-sociological inquiry, our empirical material still allows us to address the historical self-conceptions and sense of changing justifications expressed by planning actors themselves.

In practical terms, documents were collected online, by way of a network-like mapping of the organisational landscape of urban planning authorities and experts in Denmark.³ This mapping delimited the field to ‘official’, that is, institutionally framed and legitimated practices of involving citizens in urban planning processes. Mostly, documents were gathered from the web-pages of municipal planning authorities or expert consultancy agencies.⁴ A document was considered relevant to the extent that it, as one of its parts, contained descriptions (or prescriptions) of how these or allied actors involve (or should involve) ordinary people in urban planning. Most commonly, this happened in the following five types of document:

1. Legally sanctioned and regulatory planning documents, notably municipal plans (‘kommuneplaner’) and development plans (‘udviklingsplaner’);

2. Stand-alone descriptions of specific involvement processes, often written by consultants and meant to feed into regulatory planning documents;

3. Analyses of urban areas, written by municipalities or consultants hired by them, often as background to regulatory planning documents;

4. Reports on urban development and citizen involvement, written by research institutions and commissioned by either a municipality or the Danish state;

5. Catalogues of methods for involving citizens, written by municipalities, the state or consultants as part of method-sharing or development.

The final ‘archive’ thus consists of a mixture of relevant document types, written by a range of municipalities, private consultancy companies and, to some lesser extent, the state and research institutions. When taken together and subjected to analysis (as described below), this archive, as noted, lends itself to what we consider proportional claims about participation formats in Danish urban planning.

To assess the empirical scope of this material, certain boundaries and (self-imposed) limitations should be kept in mind. Most importantly, our approach entails an exclusive focus on participation processes initiated by municipal authorities or their affiliated ‘official’ planning institutions – as opposed to the whole range of self-organised civic activism thriving in the form of alternative communities, local citizen groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and ad hoc private initiatives. While these latter forms of civic participation are clearly important to urban politics, and while pragmatic sociology has proven itself valuable in their analysis, this boundary follows directly from our analytical ambition to interrogate and possibly corroborate claims about ‘the certified city’ and its entrenchment via urban planning. For such purposes, as previously noted, formal civic participation procedures provide a privileged and interesting site of inquiry, precisely because of their ambivalent moral-political positioning in between the goods and pressures at stake in different forms of commonality-building and voicing of difference and dissent.

Just as importantly, and in line with observations made above, our exclusive reliance on documentary materials clearly does not permit us to make observations about the embodied and on-site ways in which people engage in participatory settings. Many subtleties of a corporeal, inter-personal, and affective nature do not find their way into documentary forms; and if they do, they stand as ordered and formatted testimonies rather than as spontaneous practices of dissent (cf. Cheyns, 2014). However, from the point of view of inquiring into the narrowness or width of the political spaces considered legitimate in formal planning situations, this constraint is less a methodological shortcoming than an interpretive premise for our study. Hence, it should be noted that, given their role in wider planning processes, participation documents are likely to favour the specific regime of engagement in a plan, and to contribute to ordering commonalities according to a liberal grammar. Keeping this in mind, any ‘breaches’ in this expected formatting, and hence traces of other engagement regimes and commonalities, attain an immediate empirical importance.

In analysing the documents, we have focused on the diversity of participatory methods and how they unfold different forms and possibilities of civic participation. The documents have been coded in accordance with these different participatory formats. When distinguishing in fine-grained ways, there are no fewer than 162 different methods of participation described in the documents. Some are only mentioned once, while others are more extensively described and mentioned 40–50 times. For the purposes of this article, methods have been categorised into three overarching formats of participation (hearing processes, dialogue/interest meetings, and workshops), representing somewhat ideal-typical versions of the most frequently recurring methods located in the archive. Evidently, this form of classification – where we focus on ‘core’ formats that stand in for groups of more specific methods – highlights dominant tendencies in our archive, yet also understates the variations and nuances that form part of the material. Once again, this analytical practice is attuned to the broader goal of the article: highlighting a limited variation in widely recurring participation formats provides us with a robust finding against which to assess and discuss wider tendencies, and counter-currents, to claims of a ‘certified city’.

In what follows, we unfold our empirical findings in three steps. First, we analyse a powerful and commonly used participatory format, the hearing process, as well as the various critiques increasingly levelled towards this format. Second, we show how – partly in response to such critiques – new dialogue- and workshop-based formats of participation have emerged, which affirm new ways of engaging, justifying, and compromising in relation to participation in urban planning. Third, we trace how such changes in formats, justifications, and legitimate engagements converge into broader shifts in the composition of commonalities offered up by urban planning – while stressing that tensions remain, not least in between these co-existing formats.

The arrangement of participatory formats is closely intertwined with different justifications of civic participation. In Denmark, as well as in other European liberal democracies, a commonly used, highly formalised, and legally mandatory format since the 1970s is the municipal hearing process.⁵ Every time a new plan is drafted, Danish municipalities are required to initiate a hearing process, in which the draft is circulated in order for ordinary citizens, NGOs, interest groups, and others to be able to comment. Comments, suggestions, and complaints then circulate back to municipal authorities in a written process simulating a ‘conversation’, allowing people to state criticisms and receive planners’ justifications in return (in Danish, people’s written input is called a ‘hearing question’ while municipal responses are ‘hearing replies’). As planning theorist John Pløger puts it (2001, p. 230), this highly ordered form of rationalist public participation ‘supports an ideology of democracy grounded on equality and a deliberation of public interest’, in principle oriented towards ‘the better argument’ yet in practice highly structured around unequal authority.⁶

From the viewpoint of pragmatic sociology, the quasi-conversations enacted via public hearings thus rely primarily on a presumed engagement in justification, in that orders of worth are invoked in a discussion of the just arrangement of the urban situation. Indeed, the very dispositif of the hearing is well prepared for an engagement with the city in which formally disposed actors discuss, criticise, and compromise on the basis of shared, but potentially pluralistic, understandings of the urban common good. Across our material, for instance, the hearing format lends itself to commonly articulated critiques of the ‘gentrification’ of specific neighbourhoods, whereby civic actors criticise urban authorities for allowing the accommodation of economic development (market worth) at the expense of disadvantaged citizens (civic worth). In this way, and through highly formalised and well-ordered procedures, fundamental questions of urban ordering and its justification can be voiced.

In the final instance, however, municipal administrations remain entirely in charge and capable of deciding which tests to apply for future urban plans. Moreover, as a participatory format, the hearing tends to favour organised interest groups over more ad-hoc collectives and individual inhabitants, in part because of its embedding in assumptions (themselves stemming from the civic order of worth) as to how collective voices gain democratic legitimacy (cf. Sehested, 2009, p. 247). Overall, then, the hearing arrangement may be said to express an influential civic-industrial compromise, important for how the turn to participation has been domesticated into routines of urban planning. Here, the format remains highly ordered, formalised, and efficiently planned, with professional expert planners retaining final authority (industrial worth), yet also in principle open for ‘ordinary’ and ‘organised’ citizens to express their concerns and critiques under formal conditions of equality (civic worth). Through its institutionalisation in the hearing format, this compromise has attained stability in Danish (and wider) urban planning.

Perhaps unexpectedly, however, the participatory format of the hearing has also come under increasing criticism – criticism coming not from grassroots sources, but from within the world of planning authority itself, including not least from national governmental bodies and experts. This critique is linked to a larger critique of (what is cast as) ‘traditional’ planning, for which the municipal hearing is seen as emblematic. In this critique, the hearing is seen as ‘old-fashioned’ and as failing to secure the appropriate degree of citizens’ ownership of the city. For instance, in 2014, the governmentally appointed think-tank ‘The City 2025’ stated that:

Here, hearings are criticised as bureaucratic and abstract, in contrast to more preferable formats that promote joint responsibility, concrete involvement, and the differentiated needs of different groups. Essentially, then, the hearing format is criticised for its industrial elements: its bureaucratic nature, its formalisation and standardizsation, and the strong role of experts (‘planners and developers’).

Such contemporary critiques arguably draw upon, and to some extent recycle, standard critiques levelled at the functionalist and expert-dominated planning institution of the 1950s and 1960s. While hearing processes have been a legal requirement in Denmark since 1970, and while this mechanism was intended to address the lack of citizen participation in urban planning, current shifts thus (re-)position the hearing itself as allied to this ‘older’ world of bureaucratic hierarchy. As an alternative, powerful actors now call for participatory formats that are targeted to ‘local needs’, allow citizens to contribute with ‘concrete impacts on their neighbourhood’, establish ‘shared ownership of projects’, and enter into ‘binding cooperation’ with municipalities. In short, such new approaches to participatory formats interlink with the shifts in planning organisation previously described, with an increased emphasis on projects, processes, and networks; and hence, they point also to novel forms of justification and legitimate urban engagement.

The two other dominant and commonly used participatory formats in our material – the dialogue (or interest) meeting and the workshop – may be read as institutionalised responses to such critiques of the (‘industrial’) hearing process. From the outset, these formats both attempt to involve urban inhabitants in more ‘committing’ ways, stressing joint responsibilities and concrete involvement together with the differentiated needs of different ‘users’ of the city. As such, they assume specific ways of engaging with the city as a basis for involvement, and also construct justifications for participation that differ from the civic-industrial compromise. At the same time, as we will show below, they vary as composition devices for urban planning, in the sense of balancing and composing several grammars of commonality, each in their distinct ways.

In contemporary Danish planning, so-called dialogue (or interest) meetings serve as a common participatory format in which a carefully selected range of participants can express their interests and negotiate these with each other and with municipal authorities. In such meetings, planners gather a specific type of people, often referred to (in Danish) as ‘resource persons’, who are believed to possess valuable ‘resources’ that may contribute to the success of the process. Such resources may be financial (as in the cases of local businessmen) or social (as in the cases of spokespersons for local associations); indeed, such distinctions are often blurred, as in the following excerpt describing a dialogue meeting (or group) in the municipality of Gladsaxe:

Such dialogue meetings bear a resemblance to the way a variety of ‘roundtable initiatives’ have become part of contemporary transnational governance, including in the setting up of voluntary sustainability standards for specific industries (Cheyns, 2014). As argued for such settings, the dialogue meetings at work in contemporary Danish urban planning rely heavily on the engagement regime of the plan, while thereby also enforcing the specific grammar of a liberal public in which stakeholders (here called ‘resource persons’) express their opinions, interests, and preferences for specific urban options. In this way, dialogue meetings presuppose and prescribe how (selected) urban actors should engage with the city in terms of an instrumental means-end relationship, potentially turning the city and its plans into instruments that may help (specific, resourceful) inhabitants to obtain their individual and collective goals. In such planned engagements, what matters is for stakeholders to commit to and help implement practical plans, not to discuss or critique the wider purposes and justifications for them (as enabled via the hearing format).

To the planners, it is important to involve ‘resource persons’ because they represent a group of inhabitants whose influence reaches beyond their personal capacities. Indeed, the very notion of ‘resources’ allows for this generalised idea of social values being ‘(re-)invested’ in the plan, including labour, time, and commitment:

On the one hand, the dialogue meeting as a participatory format is thereby justified as a civic-market compromise, in which ‘ordinary’ citizens are given a voice in political decisions (civic worth), while at the same time lending or ‘exchanging’ their ‘capital’ (market worth) as resources for future planning. However, the expansive notion of resources at work in such settings, both financial and social, arguably points also to a different political genealogy and tension. Here, in the language of Thévenot (2011b), a range of diverse urban engagements – what is called ‘commitment’, for instance, on the part of civic volunteers – comes to be narrowly reduced to the invested, as opposed to the open-ended and searching, side of engagement in a plan. In this sense, while a trace of justifiable engagement remains, the particular composition of the dialogue meeting also bears witness to some of the oppressions at work when a liberal form of government leaves little room for critical questioning.

Something related yet distinct is arguably at work in the third commonly used participatory format, that of the workshop. This format is typically used to generate ideas. In the municipality of Brønderslev, a workshop is described as follows:

In this account, we recognise the typical process of an urban planning citizen workshop (reproduced in almost all of the more than 45 workshops we analysed): first, a user-centred and participatory mapping of personal habits, functions, and areas frequented in the city; second, a collective categorisation and prioritisation of these different functions and areas (in the choosing of a concrete problem related to the mapping); third, an idea-generating phase focused on concrete solutions; and fourth, a presentation and communication of the different solutions and ideas.

From the point of view of the sociology of engagements, what is noteworthy about this workshop format is the way in which it is carefully set up to achieve a specific translation: one in which underlying urban habits change from personalised familiarity into a more collective and planned engagement. In this sense, the workshop format as a tool of urban planning seeks explicitly to benefit from the familiarised ways in which urban inhabitants carve out spaces of dwelling in the city through the personal and localised routes of everyday life, and the habitual senses of ease and attachment thereby sustained. During workshops, such personal routes and attachments are rendered explicit and common, based on the prior construction of a social category – in this case ‘young people’ – which experts deem relevant (as a ‘user group’) to the wider planning process and urban situation at hand.

The initial mapping performed during planning workshops is thus a mapping of personal everyday lives onto a shared space (often, literally, a large piece of paper), lending shared visibility to the way inhabitants use and experience the city. The exact procedures of such mappings vary, but the principle remains largely the same. The Brønderslev example follows a common procedure, in terms of trying to map out (young) inhabitants’ everyday routes and patterns of navigation through public urban space. Here, specific aspects of inhabitants’ familiar engagements are described, such as the way they usually move through the city and their habits and routines in public space, all characterised by a personal and often bodily attachment to the city. On this basis, as noted, a process of collective prioritisation begins, resulting in ideas for future planning. This transforms the engagement from a familiar relationship with the city into a planned engagement, casting the high-schoolers as individuals capable of and willing to relate to the city as a means-ends relation; that is, to identify problems and generate solutions appropriate to their own preferences and needs.

In the workshop format, participation is justified in a version of civic-project compromise, whereby urban citizens are involved in planning though short, network-building projects that leads to new, ‘creative’ ideas. In the workshop, creative group processes are at the centre of legitimate involvement.⁸ As such, the workshop presupposes that, using the right methods, everyone (and not just planners) may generate creative and innovative ideas for the city, especially when absorbed in group work.⁹ While the workshop format is thus linked to those broader shifts in planning organisation previously sketched, its most striking feature remains the way it transforms a range of familiar urban engagements into a form legible for urban planning – a form, that is, of collective and liberal ‘preferences’.

In sum, as participatory formats, both the dialogue (or interest) meeting and the workshop thus respond to aspects of the criticism levelled at official hearing processes, by seeking to involve a more diverse set of citizens and groups in more tangible and concrete forms of planning based on shared senses of commitment and responsibility. In doing so, we argue, the moral-political territory of civic participation is simultaneously shifted, away from the civic-industrial compromise established around hearing processes from the 1970s onwards, and onto qualifications and compromises articulated more strongly with market and project worth. As such, at first sight, our analysis may be said to share observations with those broad tendencies in urban studies that stress the rise, since the 1980s, of ‘neoliberal’ forms of urban government, in which the local state is said to operate on market terms though open, flexible, and unregulated competition (e.g. Brenner & Theodore, 2002, p. 2).

However, two crucial differences stemming from our pragmatic-sociological vantage point must be stressed. First, our analysis maintains that, even as market (and project) forms of justification are on the ascendency, industrial and civic commitments still animate what is, in effect, a variegated moral-political terrain of urban civic participation. Second, and more importantly, our analysis points to a conflation often found in diagnostics of the neoliberal, according to Thévenot (2011a, p. 199, 2012), in which analysts fail to pay attention to forms of commonality operating ‘below’ the level of the common good. Hence, our analysis so far confirms how the term ‘neoliberal’ will be liable to lead one to confuse the rise of market worth with the, quite different, expansion of commitments to a liberal grammar of commonality as a way of formatting policy ‘options’ that stretch far beyond marketable goods. In what follows, we seek to adjudicate the extent to which our analysis confirms the increasing importance of this figure of the liberal public in urban planning and participation – without, however, spelling out its all-hegemonic dominance.

As we noted, the hearing process as a participatory format creates commonality on the basis of plural orders of worth. The format assumes that everyone involved can discuss and criticise the justness of an urban situation in reference to different justificatory principles. In this form of commonality, as Thévenot explains (2014, p. 18), personal concerns must be aggrandised into public worth, following strict conventions of qualification for the common good. During hearing processes, this happens via the written (quasi-)conversation between citizens and municipal authorities through operations of critique, justification, and (occasionally) compromise. However, as we have outlined, the institutionalisation of this grammar of commonality in the hearing format is nowadays problematised from within the planning world itself, associating the format with a ‘traditional’ bureaucratic, abstract, and expert-driven planning. Emphasising the differentiated needs of citizens, their concrete involvement in projects, their ownership of projects, and their joint responsibility in planning, thus also leads to a search for formats amenable to a different grammar of commonality.

Importantly, the two other participatory formats, the workshop and the dialogue meeting, establish a specific alternative: the main commonality assumed by these formats is that of individuals choosing among diverse options in a liberal public. This is true even as the two formats also differ in their compositions. In the citizen workshop, individuals communicate their familiar attachments to the city, in order for them to be transformed into personal preferences. These preferences are then communicated in a semi-public forum and presented as ideas for future developments of the city, to be mediated and negotiated further by planning professionals. Likewise, in the dialogue meeting, the special interests of different urban groups serve as the starting point for planning participation. Participation takes the resources and preferences of inhabitants into account by involving them strategically in concrete planning efforts. A dialogue meeting is thus about identifying such interests, mediating between them, and involving and investing the resources of inhabitants in mutual benefits for themselves and for urban planning at large.

In both cases, participation is then not only or primarily about ensuring the possibility of discussion about the just planning of the city – although, as we have noted, this remains a background form of legitimating such endeavours. Rather, it is primarily about involving individuals and stakeholders in a liberal urban public, in which an expanding array of actors express their differentiated interests in order for urban planning professionals to facilitate broad cooperation and negotiation. In short, participation has shifted from a main concern with involving citizens in discussing the justification of planning, to a situation in which involving citizens co-exists with quite different attempts to involve users and stakeholders into negotiations over urban interests and opinions. Rather than shrinking or expanding the political space for citizen involvement, we might say, what has happened is rather a limited pluralising and partial shift of legitimate and ‘certified’ stances for urban voicing.

In the commonality of plural orders of worth, the possibility for everyone to discuss the just arrangement of a situation remains open in principle. Citizens can rise above the dominant ordering of the situation and invoke another order of justification, a new test of legitimacy. This form of commonality is thus prepared for a distinctly critical participation, whereby it remains possible to articulate and challenge injustices (cf. Cheyns, 2014, p. 441). As we have noted, hearing processes in urban planning do in fact create a political space for such radical critique, by allowing, for instance, a denunciation of the dominance of market worth (gentrification) in the name of civic solidarity. Ironically, however, this space of radical critique ultimately remains entirely dominated by planning professionals, hierarchically positioned to determine and impose whichever tests of the urban situation they deem justified.

In the commonality of a liberal public, by contrast, configuring urban inhabitants as users or stakeholders entails at first a form of ‘empowerment’: differences in views and opinions among individuals and groups are acknowledged and their expression encouraged as helpful inputs to urban planning. This entails a powerful political potential, opening up spaces for new urban groups (such as young people) to present their demands in public and have them taken seriously. On the other hand, this political position seriously constrains the possibility of radical critique:

In the liberal public enacted in novel formats of urban planning participation, the channelling of fundamental disagreements through a language of individual choice thus makes it difficult to formulate a radical critique of urban planning.

The possibility of participating through shared experiences of affinity to an urban common-place, such as a valued neighbourhood square or an urban garden, is not very prominent in the participatory formats we encounter. This is perhaps surprising, given that such a commonality draws on those familiar urban engagements which, at least in the planning workshop format, provide a key rationale for the exercise. However, as we have argued, this format is precisely configured so as to transform such familiar engagements into an engagement with a plan (and planning). In this case, our reading is not simply, we suggest, an artefact of our method: indeed, our documentary material on workshops brims with photographs that capture the routes and maps of familiar attachments conveyed in the setting by inhabitants.¹⁰ However, while a form of familiar engagement is thus conveyed, these visuals do not pertain, ultimately, to a commonality of common-places, but rather serve as signs to authenticate their very transformation into collective liberal preferences. As such, the photographs stand as testimony less to how familiar engagements can be accommodated in urban planning, and more to the very exclusions attending a too-narrow reliance on participatory formats aligned to a liberal version of the public.

To summarise the analysis so far, what we have presented as the space of a limited plurality of participatory formats at work in contemporary Danish urban planning is meant to suggest a partial confirmation of the notion of ‘the certified city’ with which we have framed our inquiry. In line with this existing and critical pragmatic-sociological diagnostic, we find in the historical layering of dialogue meeting and workshop formats on top of official hearing processes a related translation, on the part of planning institutions, of the potentially troublesome urban citizen into the more manageable and resourceful liberal shapes of users and stakeholders. Rather than an unequivocal transition, however, clearly marking a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ of urban planning dispositifs, we stress the way these different formats of participation co-exist in ways likely to generate various moral-political tensions. While a full exploration of such pluralities and tensions is beyond the scope of our empirical inquiry, at the analytical level, it is thus worth discussing what it implies for a diagnostic such as the certified city, in particular, and for attempts to deploy pragmatic-sociological tools to diagnose broad-scale historical transformations more generally.

Hence, while our empirical analysis verifies a broad-based tendency towards restricting participatory exercises to a liberal grammar of commonality-making, it also points to how tensions may persist at several levels. First, we detect meaningful differences – between what we term dialogue and workshop formats – in the way a liberal grammar of political voicing is deployed within contemporary urban planning, as configured more (dialogues) or less (workshops) narrowly around already-certified objectives. Second, we stress that, while primarily oriented towards a liberal grammar, even these newly emerging participatory formats must ultimately be seen as co-dependent on specific moral-political compromises, including those around market and civic worth; compromises that can, potentially, be opened up for critical scrutiny. Third, and importantly, our mapping suggests that, rather than a singular shift away from the possibility of radical civic critique and towards an ordered space of mere ‘preferences’, the contemporary space of legitimate voicing has been de-centred, with the figure of the critical citizen existing side-by-side with those of the creative urban user and the interested stakeholder. What is ‘certified’ via participatory formats, we might say, is then less the urban citizen as such, and more the partial translation of this figure into more manageable, liberal shapes.

At one level, considering how the notion of a certified city attempts to read across vast territories of time and space, in terms of Western-European urban change since the 1960s until today, this need for a certain nuancing when subjected to fine-grained empirical analysis should come as no surprise. Yet, this need also points, arguably, to more general aspects of how pragmatic sociology approaches issues of historical change, a point long acknowledged as somewhat problematic in this line of work (e.g. Adkins, 2014). Hence, while extensive empirical analysis of historical planning materials would certainly be possible (see Thévenot, 2011a), the ‘methodological situationism’ (Diaz-Bone, 2011) that lies at the root of pragmatic sociology has arguably led to the favouring of other styles of historical analysis, somewhat split between multiple layers of temporality. Ultimately, we believe, it is such splits that become visible in our attempt to nuance the diagnosis of the certified city – and that call also for further, more fully historical inquiry.

Hence, it is reasonable to suggest that, in Thévenot’s (and Boltanski’s) pragmatic sociology, a three-fold distinction of temporalities is (implicitly) at work. Here, the two temporal extremes are, first, the short-term situations of concrete engagements and, second, the long-term cultural and political codification of new regimes and orders of worth as conventions of socio-political coordination (such as the ‘projective’ worth identified by Boltanski and Chiapello). In between these, processes of ‘investment in form’ (Thévenot, 1984) may be said to operate in the meso-historical scale(s) of decades and generations. Using this distinction, our approach to contemporary urban planning and participation has been located in meso-historical time. Correspondingly, the notion of composition device that we have coined for this study deliberately seeks to orient our inquiry not towards specific participation events (short-term situations), but rather towards those relatively enduring patterns and differences in forms (or formats) of participation which, as we have shown, have emerged in urban planning over recent decades.

Nevertheless, while our notion of composition devices thus shares meso-historical ambitions with Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005 [1999]) new spirit of capitalism and Thévenot’s (2015) certified city, it evidently sits at a somewhat lower level of abstraction and generality. Indeed, an analytical commitment to more situated forms of inquiry underlie the way we seek, in this article, to leverage Thévenot’s sociology of engagements and commonalities in order to gain a nuanced vantage point onto the inherent tensions and pluralities of participation in urban planning. This interest of ours was spurred, in part, by ethnographic research in the Danish capital of Copenhagen (Blok & Meilvang, 2015), leading us to observe how both liberal notions of the public as ‘stakeholders’ and more familiar and justifiable activist engagements set at the fringes of formal planning settings may be simultaneously at work. What we have done in this article, in this sense, is to move from a singular ethnographic case to a more comprehensive and systematic attempt to map out the space of participatory formats at work in contemporary urban planning, and to assess broad-scale patterns of how they work as coordination and composition devices.

This analytical up-scaling, however, admittedly also entails challenges when it comes to our ability to provide nuanced accounts of the temporal processes of layering, relative shifts in emphasis, and emerging tensions involved. Hence, since we focus here on general meso-historical patterns rather than singular processes, and since we do not study in detail how and by whom particular formats of participation have come to be invested with specific material arrangements and senses of legitimacy, we have been able to provide only a rough sketch of the way ‘participation’ itself has become both increasingly central and increasingly contested in contemporary ‘network-based’ planning practices (Sehested, 2009, p. 252). Here, indeed, participatory processes themselves have become an arena of tensions and ambiguities, as questions must be worked out about who (which ‘stakeholders’?) should be involved; when in the process involvement should happen; and how involvement should take place (which methods of facilitation and influence?). Presumably, such questions will emerge and reach settlement on a project-to-project basis, as planners draw upon available formats of participation.¹¹

Moreover, at the level of such short-term processes, one might well wish to bring more attention to the extent to which specific participatory formats allow for flexible translations across different registers of citizen voicing, on the one hand, or tend to rigidly enact (and hence ‘certify’) only a narrow range of ‘users’ and their ‘preferences’, on the other. Follow-up research in this direction would add new layers to the diagnosis of the certified city, allowing one also to detect possible critiques and counter-tendencies, as civic groups search for authentic means of expressing their urban attachments (see Blok, 2015; Blok & Meilvang, 2015). Such research, however, should still seek to address the central challenge brought out by the multiple temporalities of pragmatic sociology, in terms of how the layering of short-term situational settlements over time creates more durable institutional forms. Our notion of participatory formats as composition devices provides, we suggest, a suitable means for continuing such explorations into the evolving dispositifs of urban democracy.

In this article, we have attempted to take empirical stock, from the Northern-European vantage point of Danish urban planning, of recent shifts in civic participation procedures. Drawing on pragmatic sociology, we conceptualise the space of formal participation in urban planning as a site of tension over different forms of commonality-making and political voicing of difference in the city.

The advantages of this approach, we suggest, are twofold. First, the concepts of engagement regimes and commonality in the plural (Thévenot, 2007, 2014) allow for a significant refinement of dominant debates in urban and planning studies, moving beyond a simplified framing of (‘Habermasian’) consensus versus (‘Foucauldian’) conflict, while eschewing the over-generalised (‘neo-Marxist’) analytics of a neoliberal post-politics. In particular, we argue, the notion of plural commonalities allows for a much-needed disentanglement of two distinct but co-occurring processes: on the one hand, the relative increase in weight given to market worth in dominant compromises over urban ordering; and, on the other hand, the growing reliance on construing urban-political spaces in general on the model of a liberal public of (self-) interested stakeholders. Both tendencies are visible, as we have shown, in the Danish planning context; yet, at the level of participatory formats, they co-exist in tension rather than adding up to a singular logic.

Second, critical-diagnostic work in pragmatic sociology allows us to deploy the study of participatory formats in urban planning as a way of extending and interrogating claims to a wider shift towards ‘government through objectives’ (e.g. Thévenot, 2009, 2011a), and the related suggestion of the rise of a ‘certified city’ (Breviglieri, 2013). At this level, as we have discussed, our analysis both adds impetus to, and ultimately seeks to nuance certain aspects of, such established readings of contemporary urban politics. Towards this end, we coin the notion of participatory formats in urban planning as ‘composition devices’, that is, as material and discursive arrangements (or dispositifs) that serve to co-condition not one but several urban engagements and commonalities within the same, non-coherent political space. In this sense, we argue, participatory formats play crucial roles in bounding, transforming and, in some ways, obscuring the inherent tensions wedded to any notion of civic participation, as caught in between civic ideals of democratisation, a valorisation of familiar urban attachments, and the overarching powers to restrict planning as a well-ordered exercise of liberal negotiation over expert-sanctioned options.

Based on these findings, we affirm that the sociology of engagements and commonality in the plural provides us with nuanced tools for analysing and assessing the powers and oppressions at work in settings of contemporary urban planning, when it comes to configuring a legitimate space of political voicing of dissent and difference. Here, we want to end by stressing again that our study provides only a first and preliminary step towards such a relatively novel pragmatic-sociological agenda of urban studies. More efforts should be expended, first, in a comparative direction, in attempts to clarify common patterns and variations in the histories and cultural-political tensions at work in urban planning settings across the world. In doing so, particular attention should be paid, we have suggested, to clarifying the different levels and scales of historical urban change conjointly at work. Similarly, such efforts should be closely coordinated with attempts to assess how urban activism and grassroots movements may sometimes succeed, however partially, in dislocating the dominance of planning authorities and their carefully staged participatory settings in the articulation of alternative urban commonalities.

Throughout all of this, however, it simultaneously remains important to leverage what is arguably the signature commitment of pragmatic sociology: that is, its strong emphasis on the inherent tensions and plurality of those worlds of planning (and other) authority towards which most urban (and other) activism is directed. If such spaces remain configured, as we have argued, in ways rather different from what imaginaries of neoliberal rule posit, and also somewhat less uniformly coded than what the notion of a certified city suggests, then the space of possibility for enacting the city otherwise remains available for democratic contention.

The authors would like to thank Eeva Luhtakallio, Laurent Thévenot and other fellow participants at the special issue colloquium in Helsinki, 1–2 September 2016, for valuable comments on a previous version of this article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.