SESSION 5

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION AND PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH (PAR) IN THE IMAGINING AND DEVELOPMENT OF AFRICAN URBANISMS

Public participation is a key feature of democratic agendas and urban governance in many parts of the world and different forms of state-society engagements have been promoted by governments to address local policy and planning challenges. Participation is thereby framed as a mechanism for radical social and political transformation, a means to foster consensus within communities and institutional actors, or, at the opposite extreme, a tool for authorities to pacify discontent. Simultaneously, public participation in urban development also occurs in spaces not controlled by the state. This includes actions by social movements and civil society organisations, but also everyday practices of urban residents to navigate their daily lives. Building on these, Participatory Action Research (PAR) emerged in recent decades as one of several methodological approaches incorporating participation. It seeks to reconfigure how knowledge is generated, facilitating collaborative, participant-led spaces towards change. Since then, reflections on PAR have been punctuated with growing curiosity and critique, in equal measure.

The proposed session invites papers on different forms of both on public participation and on PAR, exploring their role in the imagining of urban futures and shaping of African Urbanisms. It seeks to bring together research from different contexts marked by social inequality and from different perspectives, enabling a discussion of public participation from the view of different actors, such as ordinary residents, organised civil society, informal leaders and brokers, or government officials. The session thereby particularly encourages participants to link their contributions to questions of urban governance, democracy, citizenship, and everyday urban politics in African cities as well as to postcolonial and decolonial ways of thinking/knowing about African urbanism.