Inclusive Governance for Urban Justice

Participatory Cities was an international collaborative workstream that involved different mechanisms to explore what the UN’s commitment to “meaningful participation” means in urban decisionmaking, planning and practice. 

Realising just cities means radical transformation in how cities are organised, managed and how decisions are made. We need to restructure existing relationships and processes amongst  governance stakeholders but also shift power towards greater citizen engagement and meaningful participation. Such goals have been recognised by the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals. 

Goals 11 and 16 commit to

  • developing effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels (16)
  • ensuring responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels (16)
  • enhancing inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries (11)

At the same time, UN policy frameworks have been criticised for not going far enough and more action is needed to deliver these aspirations on the ground.

We need more critique of the dynamics and issues in participation, including politics, power and culture; a focus on what works and what doesn’t work; a focus on tactics and strategies for change; the need to learn from social innovations and experiments and to understand questions of up- or outscaling to move from micro to macro level change.

Participatory Cities was a bridging project within the wider international partnership of Mistra Urban Futures, with a particular focus on adding value to locally funded projects in Greater Manchester and Gothenburg. The overarching aim has been to share knowledge drawn from our platforms and projects with urban decision-makers and international policy communities about how to create more participatory cities. Work in the project positioned the Mistra Urban Futures centre as a critical friend to decision-makers, helping to shape the direction of future research and practice. It also sought to draw together networks beyond formal decision-makers – in community groups and horizontal networks – to galvanise and support action to create more participatory cities.

This project drew on existing and new knowledge across the LIPs to identify lessons and insights about the realisation of the three SDG goals:

Q1: How can cities develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions? Our contribution reflects on the local interaction platform as a governance innovation and space for cross-institutional working.

Q2: How can cities ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making? Our contribution has been to review existing debates, identify secondary cases and undertake interviews with senior decision-makers in Greater Manchester to understand elite perspectives on this issue.

Q3: What needs to be done to enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management at the urban level? Our contribution has been to review lessons from existing projects in participation in spatial planning (see especially Whose Knowledge Matters?) and to identify good practice methods and processes.

An interim account of this work appeared in the Realising Just Cities UK report (September 2019) -- see pages 22-23.

People involved

Beth Perry

Beth is a Professor of Urban Knowledge and Governance and Co-Director of the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on urban governance, transformation and the roles of universities, with an emphasis on socio-environmental and socio-cultural transitions.

Beth Perry joined the Urban Institute in September 2016 and is now Co-director and leads the Co-producing Urbanisms theme.  Following degrees in European Studies and Modern Languages (BA Hons, University of Manchester) and European Integration (MA, University of Bradford), she joined the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF) at the University of Salford and became its director prior to moving to Sheffield.  During this time she completed her PhD which focused on the relationship between universities and the knowledge economy in the context of multi-level and multi-actor governance. From 2010 to 2019, Beth was the UK Programme Lead for the Mistra Urban Futures Centre, a research centre headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden and led the UK's Realising Just Cities programme. 

Email Beth

Bertie Russell

Bertie joined the Urban Institute as a Research Associate working on the ESRC Jam & Justice project and as part of the international MISTRA Urban Futures team. His research interests are in participatory and deliberative democracy; utopianism and directional demands; the dismantling of post-politics; the organisation of the commons and post-capitalist transition; and the rise of new forms of urban internationalism. 

Email Bertie

Victoria Habermehl

Victoria joined the Urban Institute in 2017 as a Research Associate working on the ESRC project Whose Knowledge matters and the British Academy project Whose Heritage matters, feeding into MISTRA Urban Futures. Her previous research focused on Latin American Cities where she researched how the economy is understood and reshaped through crisis, narratives of economic informality and everyday economic practices such as economic solidarity initiatives, autogestion and popular economy. She has a PhD in Geography from the University of Leeds, focused on organising in-against-and-beyond crisis in Buenos Aires, Argentina, through the economy, state and territory. She has previously worked as a Research Associate at University College London in the project ‘Economics in the Public Sphere’ and at Brunel University in ‘Timescapes of Urban Change’. She is part of the Contested Cities international network.

Email Victoria

More info

Jam and Justice: Coproducing Governance for Social Innovation
Whose Knowledge Matters?
Cities of Change

News, events and blog

New: Videos from #JustCities2019

In October, the University of Sheffield hosted the fourth international Realising Just Cities conference. Several parts of the programme were captured on video and are now available to watch on the UK Realising Just Cities Youtube channel. We're also pleased to be able to share slides from the policy exchange with Greater Manchester Combined Authority (see downloads below).

The YouTube selection includes:

Five responses to the question "What difference did it make?" including UK Realising Just Cities co-researcher Sharon Davies:

Exploring an English Co-Production Network - the video

Back in March, Beth Perry and others from Jam and Justice took part in an event exploring the potential for an English Co-Production Network.

Co-Production: Working with Local Democracy

In this fourth post for our Trans-local Learning mini-series, GMCA officer Anne Lythgoe reflects on a visit to Gothenburg Region.

Co-production: working with local democracy

Co-production is a way of designing and delivering public services in a more democratic fashion, giving citizens control over the day-to-day decisions which affect their lives. [source]

Greater Manchester’s 2019 Green Summit: A crossroads in the city-region's path towards climate change action?

Ryan Bellinson is a postgraduate researcher embedded in Greater Manchester's Low Carbon Hub. He reports from the 2019 Mayoral Green Summit:

From Greater Manchester to Barcelona and back again: lessons on co-production and digital democracy

To exemplify co-productive design principles means challenging the idea of an ‘end-user’ who receives a final report. It means rethinking what impact looks like and how it can be achieved. Our commitment is to engage decision-makers in a collaborative learning journey through informal spaces for exchange and international networking.  Trans-local learning is an important element in opening up spaces for learning and dissemination often reserved for academics to urban decision-makers.  Trans-localism is more than just cities learning from each other across national boundaries. It points to the need for meaningful interactions between networked individuals and groups of similarly thinking people beyond the local. What is at stake is a sense of belonging through shared perspectives and concerns that transcend local boundaries. 

In this third blog for our Trans-local Learning mini-series, Action Research Collective member Alice Toomer McAlpine reflects on her experience at the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy in Barcelona in November 2018.

How to Co-produce the City: In No Easy Steps

To exemplify co-productive design principles means challenging the idea of an ‘end-user’ who receives a final report. It means rethinking what impact looks like and how it can be achieved. Our commitment is to engage decision-makers in a collaborative learning journey through informal spaces for exchange and international networking.  Trans-local learning is an important element in opening up spaces for learning and dissemination often reserved for academics to urban decision-makers.  Trans-localism is more than just cities learning from each other across national boundaries. It points to the need for meaningful interactions between networked individuals and groups of similarly thinking people beyond the local. What is at stake is a sense of belonging through shared perspectives and concerns that transcend local boundaries. 

In this second blog for our Trans-local Learning mini-series, guests David Rogerson and Jacob Botham from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority reflect on their experience at the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy in Barcelona in November 2018.

"There's no co-production panacea"

To exemplify co-productive design principles means challenging the idea of an ‘end-user’ who receives a final report. It means rethinking what impact looks like and how it can be achieved. Our commitment is to engage decision-makers in a collaborative learning journey through informal spaces for exchange and international networking.  Trans-local learning is an important element in opening up spaces for learning and dissemination often reserved for academics to urban decision-makers . Trans-localism is more than just cities learning from each other across national boundaries. It points to the need for meaningful interactions between networked individuals and groups of similarly thinking people beyond the local. What is at stake is a sense of belonging through shared perspectives and concerns that transcend local boundaries. 

In this blog for our Trans-local Learning mini-series, guests David Rogerson and Nick Fairclough from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority reflect on their experience at the Mistra Urban Futures Annual Conference in Cape Town.

Is co-production possible in planning? Notes from a roundtable on participatory cities

Roundtable on Participatory Cities, Realising Just Cities – Comparative Co-production, Mistra Urban Futures conference, Cape Town, South Africa, November 2018

By Nazem Tahvilzadeh, post-doctoral researcher Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Planning and the Environment, Division of Urban and Regional Studies, Stockholm.

Realising Just Cities conference logo, superimposed on an image of Cape Town, South Africa

International learning with Realising Just Cities

The Realising Just Cities programme is supporting peer learning visits to Cape Town and Barcelona for public sector strategists and community practitioners from Greater Manchester, to expand their knowledge of co-productive practices and participatory democracy in other urban settings. 

Snapshot of article from Nature (print version)

How do we assess the value of co-production? New article in Nature sets out challenges.

Catherine Durose, Liz Richardson and Beth Perry look at how we assess the value of co-production in an article in Nature

The theory behind co-production is that it generates better solutions to difficult problems. But how do we measure this in practice?

"The most common way we give up our power is thinking we don't have any."

Beth Perry reflects back on Jam and Justice's Double Down Devolution debate, part of Manchester Histories Festival 2018. 

Coproducing Urban Governance Special Edition Published

There are many critiques of existing forms of urban governance as not fit for purpose. However, there is just as much contestation over what alternatives might look like. Coproduction is proposed as a response to address complex wicked issues. Achieving coproduction is a highly complex and daunting task. Bottom up approaches to the initiation of coproduced governance are seen as fruitful, including exemplification of utopian alternatives though local practices.

UK Planning Research Conference - Roundtable Discussion

Monday, September 3, 2018 - 09:00 to Wednesday, September 5, 2018 - 17:00
University of Sheffield

On 3rd to 5th September the UK and Ireland Planning Research Conference 2018 comes to the University of Sheffield. The conference offers a chance for international researchers, students, and practitioners to share work and discuss key themes and trends in planning.

Jam and Justice Discuss Devolution at Manchester Histories Festival

Monday, June 11, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Manchester Central Library

Devolution promised to open up new opportunities for community engagement and empowerment, shifting power from Whitehall to the Townhall. One year on since the election of Andy Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester, Jam and Justice's Action Research Collective are hosting a debate in Manchester Central Library to discuss the changing horizons of collective decision-making in Greater Manchester. 

Rethinking the Urban Commons

Monday, February 12, 2018 - 09:00 to 20:00

Bridging European Urban Transformations Workshop Series in Brussels 2016-2018

Global Urban Justice @RC21

How does citizen participation challenge or reinforce power relations in urban governance? What might an urban politics look like which values dissent as well as consensus? How can we contribute to realising global urban justice through critical methodologies? Whose Knowledge Matters researchers Vicky Habermehl and Beth Perry organise session at RC21 in Leeds.

Urban Transformations Roundtable

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - 16:00

This seminar is part of the 2017 RGS-IBG annual conference, running from 30 August to 1 September 2017, and will take place on 30 August. More information on the seminar is available here.

A roundtable discussion on the theme of nature of urban transformation. Panelists will be invited to address these questions, followed by open discussion.

Mapping Participatory Urban Governance

By Bert Russell

The Jam & Justice project has been looking at examples of participatory urban governance across the Global North and South. We want to find examples of inspiring, workable, and actually existing examples of how citizens can be involved in decisions, processes and structures that affect them.