Rational planning tradition

Prior to the 1970s, community planning was generally led in a top-down way by professionals.^[1] Modern community planning developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as city governments and urban planners began to create centralized, comprehensive community plans such as the garden cities of Ebenezer Howard.^[4] In this era, the rational planning model was the dominant way of approaching urban planning.^[1] Professional planners would identify an established set of goals for a project, rationally weigh a set of alternatives to achieve those goals, and then create and implement a plan accordingly.

There was very little room for public participation within these rationalistic planning models. While discussing the common threads in the vision and work of early urban planners, urbanist Peter Hall writes that "Their vision seems to have been that of the planner as the omniscient ruler, who should create new settlement forms … without interference or question. The complexities of planning in a ...a participatory democracy where individuals and groups have their own, often contradictory, notions of what should happen—all of these are absent from the work of these pioneers."^[4]

A rationalist approach to planning was often applied during the urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century.^[5] Under these programs, large areas in major cities, often where poorer people and people of color lived, were demolished, and a new plan for the area was designed and carried out.^[6] These urban renewal programs have been criticised for destroying viable communities with long histories, and displacing disproportionately black and poor people to other underserved parts of the city.^[7]

Emergence of participatory planning

In the 1960s and 70s, there was a growing wave of critical responses to these traditional rationalist approaches.^[1] Scholars criticized traditional planning methods as undemocratic and unresponsive to community needs. In her influential 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argued that centralized planning methods are disconnected from real knowledge of life in a city.^[8] In 1969, Sherry Arnstein wrote a landmark essay, A Ladder of Citizen Participation, describing different types of citizen involvement in municipal programs, and criticizing less participatory approaches to urban planning.^[9] In the 1970s a series of planning theorists suggested alternative models of urban planning which were more participatory in nature. Prominent among them were John Friedmann's model of transactive planning,^[10] Paul Davidoff and Linda Davidoff's model of advocacy planning,^[11] and Stephen Grabow and Allen Heskin's theory of radical planning. These models constituted a shift towards a more participatory planning paradigm which has influenced modern urban planning.

At around the same time, participation became increasingly central to planning policy and practice. In 1961, landscape architect Karl Linn started the first community design center in Philadelphia.^[12] Community design centers are organizations which provide planning expertise to marginalized communities. These grassroots participatory planning models became widespread, often organizing to fight major urban renewal projects.^[12] In the mid 1960s, the federal government responded to widespread criticisms of urban renewal by establishing the Model Cities Program and the Community Action Program. These two programs were part of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, and included a focus on community participation. The legislation establishing both programs required the "maximum feasible participation of the members of groups and areas to be served".^[7] These programs were influential, and marked an important turn towards a more participatory vision of urban planning.

Participatory rural appraisal

Participatory Rural Appraisal is a method of participatory planning, used most often in the context of international community development. Participatory Rural Appraisal draws heavily on the work of Paulo Freire and his idea of critical consciousness, as well as Kurt Lewin's integration of democratic leadership, group dynamics, experiential learning, action research, and open systems theory.^[18] PRA has been modified and reframed in the related models of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR).^[19] Robert Chambers, an important early practitioner of Participatory Rural Appraisal outlines a "menu" of specific methods and techniques that are central to the broad technique of Participatory Rural Appraisal, including:

• Semi-structured interviews
• Participatory mapping and modeling
• Time lines and trend and change analysis
• Transect walks
• Daily time-use analysis
• Institutional diagramming
• Matrix scoring and ranking
• Shared presentations and analysis
• Oral histories and ethno-biographies^[20]

Participatory e-planning

Participatory Planning organizations use digital tools to enhance and organize public participation in the planning process. E-participation has come into use in public service programs as information and communications technologies have become more available.^[21] E-planning draws on the tools and techniques of e-participation in the context of urban planning. It has been described as "a socio-cultural, ethical and political practice which takes place offline and online in the overlapping phases of the planning and decision-making cycle, by using digital and non-digital tools".^[22] Participatory e-planning research has generally focused on incorporating forms of participation with existing governance and urban planning processes. Some participatory e-planning programs involve the use of relatively simple digital tools like online questionnaires, surveys, and polls to consultant citizens.^[21] Other programs have used information and communications technologies that were designed for everyday use — such as mainstream social media — in order to seek out more widespread and open-ended public input. Often, the public engages with planners through social media outlets even if their input is not directly solicited, indicating that e-planning has the potential to foster organic bottom-up participatory planning.^[23] Other participatory planning processes have used existing digital technologies like virtual reality,^[24] and interactive games^[25] to increase participation. Some digital tools have been designed specifically to encourage public participation in urban planning.

Non-hierarchical planning

In 1965, Christopher Alexander published an influential essay, A City is Not a Tree, later expanded upon in a book of the same name. In the essay he argued against mainstream planning practices which represented cities with overly simplified hierarchical models.^[31] In those models, small systems or areas in cities were thought of as subdivisions of larger systems and areas, which were in turn thought of as subdivisions of larger systems and areas, in a model that resembled a tree. Alexander argued that these models are easy to understand, but do not reflect the reality of cities, in which different systems and communities interact in complex and overlapping ways. Alexander proposed that urban planners should think of the city instead in a non-hierarchical "semi-lattice" structure. Alexander stresses that these new models require planners to incorporate much more complicated understandings of the city, and it is difficult for planners to understand all of the complicated interactions and structures that are incorporated in this semi-lattice view.^[31]

Other scholars drew on this to argue for more participatory, non-hierarchical approaches to planning. Scholars argued that non-hierarchical models of the city were too complex to be understood or designed through a centralized process, and so must rely on the input and perspectives of a wide range of people.^[32] This non-hierarchical understanding of how cities function laid the groundwork for the participatory planning paradigm.

Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation

Responding to the persistent gap between the desires of local communities, and traditional rationalistic approaches to planning, Sherry Arnstein wrote her essay A Ladder of Citizen Participation in 1969 to "encourage a more enlightened dialogue".^[33] The ladder identifies different levels of citizen participation in government programs.

Arnstein describes eight different forms of participation, arranged in three categories: non-participation, degrees of tokenism, and degrees of citizen power. She advocates that government projects and planning processes should involve the forms of citizen participation that she places higher on the ladder.^[33] Her critical assault has become influential on current theory and practice of citizen participation in urban planning and government programs, and is an important piece of the participatory planning paradigm.^[34][35] Participatory planning programs incorporate many different levels and forms of participation, but they generally draw on Arnstein's critique of programs that have no role for citizen input, or only incorporate tokenistic participation.

Participatory planning models

Within the participatory planning paradigm, there are several theoretical models of what participatory planning should look like. The kind of participation that these models call for varies, but they all emphasize participation as a central piece of a well-designed approach to planning. The following are several of the most influential participatory planning models.

World Bank

The community-driven development approach advocated by the World Bank is an example of participatory planning.^{[citation needed]}

A number of examples link participatory community plans with local government planning. One widely applied example is South Africa's national policy of community-based planning methodology, and an adapted version, the Harmonised Participatory Planning Guide for Lower Level Local Governments,^[39] which is national policy in Uganda. Community-Based Planning has been applied across the whole of eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa, including the City of Durban, and is being rolled out in Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality.^[when?]

Britain in the 1940s

After the bombing of British cities during World War II, planning advocates wanted to use the reconstruction planning as a way to engage the public.^[40] The planners wanted more authority in the political system to play a more substantive role within their democracy. The planners created new techniques to, "communicate with laypeople, including mobilizing publicity, measuring public opinion, organizing exhibitions, and experimenting with new visual strategies."^[40] They also developed a forum to educate and ask the public about various plans and policies.^[40]

Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood

Cincinnati's Over-The-Rhine's Comprehensive Plan was created in a participatory planning process, but its consistent monitoring of its implementation failed.^[3] Looking at Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, geographers saw ways to obtain "necessary data, create a land-use GIS to analyze the data, update the data, and monitor the progress of the implementation of the Over-the Rhine Comprehensive Plan".^[3] In the case of Cincinnati, it is proven that plans that are not carried out fail to live up to the participatory planning theory. Failures like that of the Over-the-Rhine plan make it harder to make progress toward the plan's goal as well as silencing participants.^[3]

Managing forests

Forest management involves a variety of stakeholders, including the owners of the forest, locals, tourism enterprises, recreational uses, private or official conservationists, or the forest industry. Each of these parties has a different goal in using forests, which complicates planning.^[41] Participatory approaches and computerized tools like decision support systems (DSS) have been used to help balance these diverse priorities.^[15] The features of DSS that can help participatory processes in the context of forest management. are the following: "group decision support, possibilities to include other values than timber production, flexibility of system to include non-traditional forest data and management options, and multi-criteria decision analysis tools.^[15]"

Center for Urban Pedagogy

Association of Collaborative Design

In the U.K., the Association of Collaborative Design (ACD) is a non-profit organisation that campions participatory urbanism. From 2021 to 2022, ACD was a World Urban Campaign Partner with UN-Habitat.^[42] The group was launched in 2020.