 Hello everyone, very warm welcome to today's IED debates on citizen participation in planning. I am really excited about this panel who we've got and they're all going to be introduced to you in a moment. Masses of knowledge in this kind of virtual room and I'm really looking forward to hearing all of their insights on the needs and the challenges of citizen participation in planning. My name is Juliette, I'm the events officer at IED and I'm just going to be behind the scenes providing some tech support. Okay with that I am absolutely delighted to introduce Diana Mittlin, she is the professor of global urbanism in the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester and a senior associate at IED. Very fortunate that Diana's going to be moderating our panel today so Diana over to you please. So thank you so much Juliette and it's an absolute honor to be doing this as some of the listeners will know and participants on the panel I have a very long association with IED. Indeed IED introduced me to development and the challenges of citizen participation. So the key inspiration for this one hour webinar is the special issue that we did of environment and urbanization, environment and urbanization is a journal that the human settlements group at IED produce comes out every six months and the last issue the issue that is was just produced in October focuses on this theme citizen participation in planning from the neighborhood to the city. We were discussing how to share some of the essential lessons that emerge from this collection of papers and it seemed that this webinar format was particularly well suited to doing that. We had a fantastic response to request to take part I'm only sorry that we could not include all the authors who contributed to the special issue and we decided that it would be best for the listeners if it was themed so we concentrated on these three questions which I'll introduce to you we have structured the webinar around presentations from the speakers the seven speakers to be followed by a question and answer as Juliet just highlighted please throw out whatever challenges you like we know that we won't have time to cover them all but as we did with the previous webinar we will produce a blog following this which will capture some of the main conclusions maybe challenges from the discussion but is also for us a platform where we can pick up questions that we think are really important but we ran out of time so please just throw out your your throughout the dilemmas the the frustrations whatever you wish to raise so as I said we're going to have three questions I'll introduce these question to you as we go but just maybe to give you a bit of an overview so the first question is all about whether or not we should or shouldn't be pessimistic about the possibilities so we have two people who are talking to that one Sally Kaywood who's just completed a postdoc at the University of Sheffield and who works particularly on sanitation in South Asia urban sanitation so is well equipped to talk about challenges and participation also Katalina Ortiz from the Development Planning Unit at University College who's who's been involved in the no program there and has done some really fascinating research around participation in Havana that she's going to share with us the second question is really to do with um it is is what one of my ex colleagues at AI ID classified as the snuggle or struggle debate how do you engage the state how how can you really you really draw the state on board but not compromise what you're trying to achieve so Tara Sylvanon will talk to that drawing on experiences in Mexico City Ana Paula the mental walker will look at policy councils from Brazil and uh Slatter Boussanovich Makora Apologies Slatter I'm sure I didn't get a pronunciation right well we'll also comment on that from the perspective of participatory planning from Serbia and then finally we'll turn to the right to the city and we have two further presentations Beatrice Dikali who will look at some of the work of architects without borders in three cities across the global south and Vanessa Castambroto who challenges our assumptions about participation with her paper in E&U queering participatory planning and really asks us to think about whether the heteronormative assumptions can be challenged in a very positive way to open up new possibilities so I think that's all I should say by way of introduction I'm going to now turn to the first two speakers uh so let me just read out the question they've been asked to respond to so the academic literature is critical about the potential for citizen participation to catalyze an inclusive urban process that leads to social transformation do you share that pessimism I know many of my civil society colleagues are waiting for your answer so over to you Sally thank you very much Diana and thank you to the whole team to have this opportunity this is an excellent webinar to be part of so thank you very much this is a big question to tackle first of all and I'm a bit scared I'm the first one but just a bit of it in context my contribution to the special issue focused on the limits and opportunities for scaling participation in Dhaka Bangladesh and I looked in detail at the evolution of three urban poor collectives operating at a city-wide level in the paper I highlight how the ability of these collectives to scale participation up from projects to policy out from across new settlements and areas within between households in low-income settlements and across from one service to another such as water and sanitation to housing is actually limited by three overlapping statements of all society processes and these processes are firstly the politicization and increased surveillance of NGOs secondly shifting donor preferences towards short-term service delivery and the creation of new community community-based organizations or CBOs and thirdly the ongoing dominance and paternalism of NGOs towards low-income settlement residents and I argue that attempts to scale in this context may struggle to evade or transform deep structures of dependency patronage and intermediation so you would see from that analysis a very pessimistic kind of argument but that's actually something that I don't entirely share and for three quick reasons I'll just highlight now first is that much of the literature on participation as I'm sure colleagues here know especially in relation to development projects remains normative and very western centric and rarely takes into account the active agency of residents who navigate deep structures in their daily lives and that can be through processes of patron-led collective action or collective clientelism so we need to look a little bit more differently at how we conceptualize participation in different contexts around the world secondly well much of my work is focused on community-based organizations created for water and sanitation projects many of which have design faults in them because of their short-term nature there were examples where you can actually challenge some of these limitations to scaling through other models of participation for example through multi-purpose cooperative societies that have been involved in resisting eviction lobbying for legal services and also through multi-stakeholder coalitions tackling challenging issues like housing as well as building up a stronger coordination between these three groups I mentioned before including paying female leaders especially many of whom have the burden of participation without pay and it's talking to these leaders that you realize that even though we might be pessimistic there's a lot of hope and optimism because many people are very proud of the work they do on the ground there's also a methodological question about who we engage with and how and actually how we track the evolution of these organizations over time so although it's challenging I'd say it's complex and dynamic and there is hope amid pessimism so thanks a lot so thank you Sally thank you for the optimism which for me flows out of this collection of papers whilst recognizing the challenges Catalina let's move from Dakar to Havana and thank you Sally for keeping to the three minutes that was super helpful Catalina thanks a lot I'm going to be moving and talking a bit about experience that we were tracing with my colleagues in Havana but I think to address this question I think I might have to also move a little bit and draw from my experience in general with participation and I think that as an urbanist I practice what I call radical hope on the potential that societies have to change themselves and in the rising impetus of many collectives of not going back to the normal after the pandemic I would agree though with many of the critics of participation that neoliberal planning have depoliticized and co-opted several practices of citizen engagement and these practices have eroded and generated a skepticism on what participation is and what can it deliver and it has been reduced to a search of consensus or validating mechanisms of already decided interventions of extractive capital and I also consider that many of these critiques have highlighted how our lack of an intersectional understanding of participation also some practices of participation have further exclusion and oppression of particular groups particularly women renters sexual dissidents and racialized groups nonetheless we have the imperative and the need of a persistence of widening democratic channels when thinking about how changing our cities for the better and how we can find new ways of being together peacefully as we needed so badly in these very sometimes dark times for that we need to ask ourselves our question then who drives change through which means and how to direct that change in a progressive direction and by progressive I mean here change the state to favor the majority of people and to use participation to redistribute power and to foster special justice in that way participation is not only about inclusion in the existing social contract but also a means to change and push for the change of the social contract itself this implies perhaps that in the wake of this epochal change as some has described this moment to rethink the terms of the discussion and unlock the catalytic power and the promise of participation and I think we have at least and growing from the discussion that we had in the case of Havana understanding if we if our vocabulary revert to us inspirations and methods are attuned to the challenges that urban change requires so on the one hand thinking about the vocabulary we are using is it capturing at the end this idea of progressive change maybe we need to talk about the negotiated co-production of space for instance when addressing the case of Havana something that we did was trying precisely to think about what is the different frameworks that locally are used to depict what and how social engagement happens to think the transformation of the city the second aspect is the idea of revert to us and I think there are many arenas where collective action is taking place and perhaps we need to expand our understanding of participation of those spaces and those practices that are carving out spaces to express dissent and the right to protest in this sense giving recognition of the inventive spaces as myrata could call it of those spaces where progressive change is happening and in that way we need to to bring to the discussion the full spectrum from protest to elections and all in between the third point I could say that is drawing heavily on the discussion and what we learn it with the Havana case is trying to understand what are the sources of inspiration and I think for us was key to learn from the trajectories of the local experimentations and invitations that were found in the case of Havana trying to precisely understand this patchwork of the legacies of the memory of people places and institutions and in the paper we illustrate this through the lenses of three particular cases and that we show how it's important to understand the myriad leading actors the type of alliances that were brought to light in the city but also how the regulatory frameworks knowledge management strategies and financial and endogenous resources were taking place in different ways and how this collection and the lessons from from these practices are very important to actually adapt to the challenges of a new constitutional framework that is favoring local and decentralized urban development and just to conclude I think the fourth point to actually address those pessimists is also trying to think and renew the methods of engagement to further epistemic justice and recognition of the different types of urban knowledge as we need to work with more creative and inventive methods including the ones of the digital sphere to address the hybrid war we even at the end and just to conclude I think the catalyst power of participation can only be achieved if we activate the collective spatial imagination for just city and planet. Thank you so much Catalina. So a body of reflection in these papers on that critical issue how can academics maintain a critical perspective in the face of these efforts by citizens and academics themselves. So moving on to the second question we're going to start Tarun with your reflections from Mexico City which look at how the second question that was posed considerable efforts have been made by civil society to get the state to support participation but the results are very mixed. So the question we posed was is this the right approach Tarun over to you. Thank you Diana. I do think that civil society actors hold an essential role in participation both in seeking support for participation and to question the structures that are made available by state actors. So the role also relates to addressing the imbalances in participatory processes and seeking more place-based approaches to participation. This is relevant in the context of settlements that have informal histories and are transforming into parts of the formal city where imbalances between participation relating to self-built measures and more formal channels of citizen participation can be prominent. My research in Mexico City shows how despite the city government's efforts to develop citizen participation these processes were not taken up by residents in a neighborhood in the eastern borough of Isdapalapa. The neighborhood that was formed through residents efforts and self-built strategies most in the 1980s had created organic participation patterns that relied on residents collaborating in small neighborhood groups street by street sharing responsibility before block level representation was developed. While these were all needs driven approaches relating to neighborhood improvements they did contribute to a local ethos of participation that then following further neighborhood change and formalization has not been transferred through to formal citizen participation structures and more border representation. So in light of this neighborhood the introduction of formal citizen participation structures has not supported local engagement as residents were unaware of the contemporary participation channels and they do not rely on local representatives. So while there are several reasons behind this such as discontentment with the arrival of social housing and persistent issues with social as well as physical infrastructure there's an evident gap between what was previously an active neighborhood where people took part in local matters and what has gradually become a disengaged neighborhood. So while there are participation structures in place these are not supported by local residents largely because of past experiences and there are different premises of participation what is actually missing is the transferability of a city-wide module to meet local circumstances and I do see this as a missed opportunity in terms of co-production and shows the importance of civil society actors in questioning how the disconnection between differing processes of participation could actually be addressed. Thank you. Thank you so much and I found your paper particularly I guess insightful because so much of my early learning was based on examples from Mexico and Mexico City which was such a driving force in the 70s and 80s. Let's perhaps turn to a little bit the next experience from the Policy Councils in Brazil, Ana Paula. Hello, my co-author Abigail Friendly and I would like to thank the editors of Environmental and Urbanization and also IED for inviting us. So yes Diana our article shows mixed results leading us to conclude that social movements enabled with associations cannot exclusively focus on institutionalized forms of participation. Is this the right approach? Our finds show that the right approach is a moving target as the same participatory mechanism can yield different results at different political conjunctures so in Porto Alegre the Urban Policy Council changed from an exclusive club of experts in the 1940s to a channel for community engagement and social control of policymaking in the early 2000s and then again to a mechanism that legitimizes profitable public and private interests. Also the Public Policy Council of Niteroi which was a product of a democratization struggled to meaningfully include marginalized groups. This is said because national coalitions of Czech dwellers, social movements and progressive professional unions have fought hard to establish federal mandates for participation. The 2001 federal city statute established urban policy councils and as a result hundreds of cities became this field of contention. This council became this field of contention over access to land and development rights. Powerful actors they wish to maintain the urban poor segregated in precarious settlements and these actors appropriate co-opt and subvert institutions that have under certain conditions advanced spatial justice. Like urban policy councils, participatory budgets have been an achievement of the grassroots organization but right now the same grassroots organizations are responding to the inefficacy of these institutions through lawsuits to enforce participation standards as well as street and social media demonstrations. In the case of Porto Alegre housing advocacy groups withdraw and rejoin institutionalized channels of participation in search of political efficacy. The voices of the disenfranchised especially those living in precarious settlements became very hard to hear because public and market actors dominated the councils. Then what the federal mandated accomplished through policy councils was a temporary delay of real estate interests and a buying time for community organizing. Urban policy councils also established a limited level of information sharing democratizing technical information extending the reach of policy communities to those living in informal settlements but mostly only revealing the unequal impact of planning instruments other than enforcing social justice. More broadly in the 1990s urban elites combated inclusive urban governance by challenging its institutionalization. However right now and since the 1990s we live in times that elites combat participation, protest and collective action for social justice with participation, demonstration and collective action that promotes conservative and reactionary causes. Any new participatory innovation or even collective action by disenfranchised groups and their allies are likely to be subverted. Civil society will have to assess whether or not it's worth fighting for once beloved participatory institutions. Most likely social movements and shack dweller unions will alternate between the streets, the courts and the institutional channels of urban governance. Thank you. Thank you. As Anna Paola explained her results are mixed in a sense your policy councils are one more terrain who had I think a more positive experience. Okay thanks you thank you and thank you for the institute for this opportunity for me and my colleague Igor Mishovich who prepared this paper and submitted to the journal and that you accepted for publishing and also there is a so we are bringing experience from Serbia and from how the how to involve the an ethnic community and ethnic minority that is disadvantaged and very forward in the process in the urban planning process in actually developing urban plan for the settlement where they live on urban plans that they are and to actually the people to be directly involved in the plans that directly affect their lives. So starting from the question is this engagement of a civil society in this civil society organization in this process I would say that yes that is a right approach. Since for example in Serbia we have here commitment of the state to develop urban plans and to regular regularize Roma settlements and there is participation of the community is one of the pillar of this strategic document. We have these regulation on urban planning that has some provisions on the inclusion or participation or engagement of citizens in the planning process but the reality is a bit different than those things that are said in those on all these documents or law. So we are here bringing in this paper our experience from 11 municipalities and 11 Roma settlements and starting from our previous experience in working with Roma communities and also when developing urban plans but also developing the other implementing different activities that we always try to involve and always work together with community. We realize that if we want to together to develop urban plans for those communities it is really important to go beyond these just formal elements from the law of strategic documents. So we together within the project that was supported by the European Union we actually invented some kind of innovative approach and try to find the spots where it is possible and how it is possible to increase the participation and to ensure the active and real participation of the inhabitants of those settlements in the in the planning process. So in all those steps so since we work in 11 municipalities we had the chance to you know to compare the situation from one to another and although we had a frame of and let's say in steps developed how to involve and how to include people from the settlements it was really different from one settlement to another. So yes it is a good approach but it is not the only way so we need different approaches we really need to not to think yes we are thinking about now for example about Serbia about Europe or about some other countries but it is when you go directly to the terrain you really have to listen what community say about what their problems what their needs are and what they want to solve and in this very moment it is very important and very crucial to have a civil society organization because they could be linked between local authorities state authorities between planners and citizens. Okay so and it is just one more it is as we all know participation is a very demanding process in terms of time in terms of money and also from our early experience it could be also implemented but in some period it could be forgotten and so I believe also that if we need some idea to survive we should rethink that and we should redesign desire again and implement so thanks. Thank you so much Anna fascinating paper from Eastern Europe so if you have time to read the journal please do you look at that paper also so let's turn to the last question and the last question goes back to this broader potential of participation slatter where you ended and it asks the two commentators to explain to us how they understand the potential of participation to help realize the right to the city Lefebvre's right to the city that has so captured the imagination Beatrice we're going to start with you. Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to this event I will address this question as someone who has been thinking about participation from a design perspective mainly by conducting action research with a non-profit organization called the architectures and frontier UK and from this position thinking about the potential of participation in advancing the right to the city means largely thinking about ways of looking beyond localized everyday experiences of participation and engaging with the outcomes that participation can have within a broader spatial but also temporal context at the level and within the time frame of the city and its institutions and the shifting scales that that the right to the city calls for has for me several implications and as a process it means thinking about the city as a collective endeavor and as they're coming together of many localized acts of organizing resisting and making claims and and they're coming together that has as you've all been discussing several complexities to it and as an outcome it means engaging with ideas of the common good that link across diverse places diverse perspectives but also across quite different life experiences and positions and in the article included in this special issue Alexander Fredianian I have reflected on the work of ASF to discuss some of these points we explored what all design methodologies can play within participatory processes to help social movements and their support networks in examining and also enacting upon the wider scale of the city and we did this by drawing from our work with partners in Keto in Cape Town and in Freytown and we found that design again understood as part of a larger participatory process can support the shift in scaling in two main ways firstly participatory design as the potential of bringing together the micro and the everyday with the marker and the long term and by beginning with the details from for instance by drawing the places where people live on a day-to-day basis design methods can potentially enable us to think about the city in a way that is embodied and that is relational rather than abstract and universal and it can be difficult for us for any of us to make sense of the scale of the city as a whole or of the technical information that makes up policy documents and in our experience designs embodied and quite practical perspective can become a powerful tool to enhance a sense of presence and agency within these spaces and processes that are otherwise quite difficult to grasp and to discuss and engage with and in this sense we found that participatory design carry via possibilities for change that are within reach that maybe start from the micro and can affect the micro scale and I'm not saying that design necessarily does this but it has this potential as an approach and secondly it seems to us that participatory design can nurture people's capacity to aspire especially when this capacity has been challenged by the experience and that the continued repeated experience of oppression or exclusion and in the sense design can be a way to help imagine collectively alternatives for the future and of course design is not the only way to explore imagination however when it is practiced as a collective and collaborative act of imagining of possibly visualizing the future it holds a quite unique capacity to nurture imagination to open up possibilities to explore alternatives to the present and this potential of design I find is connected to what Ayuna Padurai described quite famously as people's capacity to aspire as a future-oriented cultural capacity to imagine pathways that link present actions to future outcomes including future ideas of the common good or what the common good might look like so to conclude perhaps what our work suggests is that under certain conditions participatory design understood as part of a wider and more strategic participatory process can contribute to social mobilization by connecting the everyday and the strategic and by projecting ideas into the future and in this slide you can then become part of the range of rituals and devices that grassroots groups can use to help realize the right to the city. Thank you so much thank you Beatrice okay let's pass to the last of our guests Vanessa. Thank you thank you Diana thank you everybody and I did the whole team and also thank you to my co-authors for this wonderful special issue and also for letting me know part of it and I will also answer the question from the perspective of the paper and the first line of the paper I believe it is all over the world people suffer violence and discrimination because of their sexual orientation and gender identity so obviously there's no right there's no possibility for a right to the city when there is this kind of violence and discrimination happening anywhere in the city so if we understand participatory planning as a radical democracy experiment we have to ask how can it achieve that how can it target those those problems of violence and discrimination and what I found on on my own career is that these questions of sexual orientation and gender orientation were rarely tackle in participatory planning so I asked myself why and because in the end in the paper I concluded that not only queer issues have to be included in participatory planning but also participatory planning can be challenged from a queer standpoint so if you start to think why are these queer questions not considered in participatory planning for me I had to approach this from a strange perspective because most of my research has engaged with climate change but I thought it was vital and urgent because I do believe that any response to climate change has to be participatory and that by being participatory has to cannot be actively excluded anyone so I found three issues that I described in the paper the first issue is that in every participatory planning there are often active processes that exclude queer issues from participatory planning for example people are often when they are interested in specifically issues that are LGBTIQ they are asked to create their own separate groups to discuss those issues as if those issues were not the concern of everyone but also by doing that separation we are missing many opportunities of bringing the unique opportunities from those queer communities so what in the queer literature is called a queer erasure so the perspectives of queer communities they are erased from those processes so how can we call that a radical democracy experiment if we look at the specific experiences that queer communities have there's a some fascinating research from South Africa by Takenan Hassan which really kind of opened my eyes about how LGBTIQ communities in informal settlements have valuable experiences that can contribute to participatory planning even for example the way they can construct enterprises and business models in the context of chip marginalization the specific mechanisms for the organization of practices of resistance the provision of health care and so on so that first barrier that separation of queer issues and queer communities from the overall process of participation as if they knew something distinct and they couldn't be included in the whole process is a challenge the second barrier is the endurance of Diana has already mentioned this heteronormativity heteronormative practices are those that assume that there are only two opposite genders masculine and feminine and that the preference is always for sexual relations between those genders and these are assumptions that effectively influence everything we do every aspect of our life from what constitutes a family and a home to who has a voice in political action so again participatory planning has to challenge these heteronormativities to ensure that everybody has a voice so one one key insight that I got from this research is once you start challenging one form of discrimination for example in terms of sexual and gender orientation we have to challenge a lot of other structural factors that also make that discrimination possible so discrimination of people because of the gender orientation or their sexual orientation is tied with discrimination the practices of racism sexism and ablation so this is a question that we sometimes refer as intersectionality so that challenges how we do participation and finally there are very basic practical barriers and often some of them appear in some moments like you cannot pass over them including the the violence the institutionalized violence against queer communities in many countries of the world but many of these issues also happen in our everyday life and there are practicalities that we can address in our own practices so in the queer literature there's a an interesting insight about a gesture and the power of a gesture the power of a small thing that you do to make people safe around you to allow people to express emotions to express different perspectives the other idea that I find from the queer literature which I find very inspiring is the idea of failure of alloying failure to happen in participatory planning not failure as a way of learning for future success but rather about the fact that we have to continue living without necessarily accepting external models of relations and we have to recognize that mutual acceptance requires multiple tryouts and therefore failure is what enables that participation to happen over time so when we are discussing whether participation is successful or not many times it's not but that doesn't mean that it has to be stopped I think that's what the example of Slater in Serbia shows very well in my opinion so at the end of the article I paraphrase this a slogan from the feminist activist in Chile and Argentina so any radical democracy experiment should be queer will be queer or will be nothing at all so I do think engaging with queer theory not as an addon but really as something that can transform the practice of participatory planning is really important for the right to the city so thank you Vanessa and so I think to me there's something very powerful about Vanessa's argument about really interrogating difference within communities and celebrating difference as a way to change the way in which we do things so we have a few questions that have been thrown back to the panel Juliet maybe you could bring up all of the panel now so we have a few questions Josh Ayres asked about the significant barriers to participation which we've touched on a little bit but maybe you feel there's some that have been not not elaborated sufficiently Tath Gata asked about city government capacity and that kind of goes back to this issue that motivation the will to participate is not sufficient that there needs to be an understanding of capabilities to participate that also came up in a different context in the context of citizens themselves when Beatrice was talking about Apigurio's capacity to aspire Josh also came back with a second question about combining formal and informal residents and there is a strong theme in some of this literature about the need to make a cross-class alliance to progress changes in the way that cities work arguably particularly around issues such as climate change Sarah Sabre asked particularly about issues of youth and child participation which I have to say for me Vanessa returns to some of your challenges because to really get children participating well requires us to rethink power in a context to give power to the powerless and to think through how practices can change fundamentally and then Caroline, Caroline Moser asks about whether we will be useful to talk about what's meant by planning you know the need to interrogate really what we're talking about and is it generic is a generic definition useful or indeed does participation depend on the type of planning do we have to be more discriminatory we have to be more careful in our categories in order to understand the parameters of the debate so a number of questions thrown out we have a bit of time to respond to the question up there's one more Samuel Elong any experience on how citizen participation in a COVID-19 closed economy has been enhanced and I personally have seen a few examples but the panel is here for you so we'll see would anyone like to jump in and respond to any one of those questions is anyone of those questions particularly inspiring for one of the panel members I think I can tackle so a lot of my work has been about engagement on disasters so I've had to say something a little bit about it but in relation to this paper originally I got interested in this aspect of queer communities and queer participation because of the role that some queer communities have provided in helping people in contexts of disasters and in urban crisis particularly in urban environments so I would really recommend some of the literature there which is not being written by me but people like Ben Wissner and others have done really interesting work in this area so I really like the way you talk about a Jewish and child participation Diana I cannot find the questions because there are many but I really like that question I think is really important I don't understand why children are not active in participatory processes and in one of the participatory exercises we conducted in Maputo we made a big party and then the children came at the end of the event it was really useful so I would really subscribe that and then the other question about planning I think we need I think what the practical experiences of planning in this specialist you show so we have to think what planning is so I think Caroline's question is spot on and for me planning is an ambiguous process and not necessarily always institutionalized and there are many ways in which citizens regularly plan without the state or together with the state a little bit or here with the state and now so those those processes are quite complex and I think planning can manifest in many ways but I do think for me planning has to be a radical democracy experiment in the sense that it has to aspire to deliver the right to the city thank you actually as well who would like who else would like I've realized I've left it okay I'm just going to throw it I didn't mean to overlook Vidya's question I'm not sure if it came in later but particularly dealing with discrimination on social and sexual differences so I think we've touched a little bit on that and then another two questions have been thrown into the mix so the role of information education and communication strategy on enhancing or influencing citizen participation and training needs that might help citizens to be more effective who would else would like to comment on one or other of these questions Ana Paula please comment on this one so in some of the urban policy councils my colleague Abigail and I observed we encountered pedagogical materials for education training the federal government also provided training on technical and urban planning issues at some point so regarding the question of planning then I do believe that there is no topic that is too technical or out of reach but the idea of co-producing the plans and embodying local knowledge is very important so it's not only that we are educating but we are learning because the planners and the technical the architects they don't leave that reality so they are also learning that reality of course these things depend on funding and depend on the willingness of the parties involved to continue this collaboration so we need the government and we also need the communities empowered to engage in this type of planning co-planning regarding the question of covid it's related to another research but what I noticed in Sao Paulo in participation research with the social movements in the city of Sao Paulo during covid is that there is a there was a moment of reverse logic because the lack of federal government measures for covid the cities even conservative cities had to contact and seek the support of the social movements to reach their populations so there was a moment there with providing food security that the local governments had to depend and rely on the networks of social movements likewise with my work with refugees here in Michigan a similar thing happened right language issues to reach out to communities that don't have the language skills or cannot access the social services available because they are new or not part of urban governance network okay who else would like to comment who would like to go next Catalina make few few comments I think Caroline's question again is is very key and I think how we address this issue in the context of the paper in Havana in a way make us move to actually go and see and understand the history the whole genealogy and the whole architecture of the state because it was not feasible to understand planning through the lenses of where the city plan is because that was not the case in Havana so we started addressing and trying to think planning as that contested the space where different groups had different ideas of how to shape the direction of of collective action and the direction of the state itself and I think maybe moving to what Collins is asking in terms of the role of information education and communication strategy I think maybe drawing in my experience directly with the spatial planning in the city of the gene this is absolutely essential and that's why more and more I'm working on critical pedagogies because I think it's if we understand that everyone is a city maker therefore we need to really understand the different strategies for actually thinking together how to change the city as a whole and understand the urban processes that's why education aka pedagogy urban pedagogy in this case is essential and perhaps we are not paying enough attention to that pedagogical dimension that is so key for actually making people more interested in the processes of thinking the city differently thank you Catalina who else would like to jump in and deal with perhaps one of the questions Terry oh then I have a post of hands so Terry next and then Beatrice thanks Daniel I'll be brief what I really wanted to discuss is the idea between bringing connections or having collaborations between informal and formal residents in cities and how this could facilitate participation I do think that is hugely important I'd be really interested in hearing views from your the panelists your experiences about this and your observations you have my experience for Mexico City shows that the city is quite divided and I see issues in terms of how these types of collaborations could be achieved there were also divisions within the neighbourhoods where I was completing my research and you could really see these divisions that were strong between residents who are the people who had really arrived to build the neighbourhoods who had kind of persisted with this struggle sort of informal areas and then people who arrived there later on who lived in social housing who were basically replaced their rehoused from other parts of the city so I'm hopeful in terms of these collaborations but based on my research experience I haven't seen really the way forward so I would be really keen to hear any thoughts that others have about this thank you thank you Terry and Beatrice hello yes I thought that I tried to I don't have to answer but I do address the question on government capacities in general by Tata Gata's and capacities to engage citizens but also there was a question by John I think about training needs that would help citizens to become effective participants and I think a lot of the work that we've been doing with ASFUK has to do with exchanging knowledge and capacities and participation and time to enhance on various sides like from professionals and citizens governments to enhance the capacity to work together and I was thinking that there's one aspect that has become more and more central in our work in that sense is about understanding what others are very independent what participation actually looks like and should be in a or could be in a particular context before we think about capacities that are needed and that need to be in place but then in an aspect related to this has to do with thinking about what tools and instruments and and sort of processes or rituals we use for participation and I'll try to explain this to an example like we've been working in in Freighton for several years now that from maybe four years in supporting the Sierra Leone Uruguay Research Center and the Federation in developing a number of community based plans community action plans for informal settlements and in conducting this work recently we were having a workshop about how to communicate the outcomes of of this work to local communities and something that came across very strongly was that participants from one of these these neighborhoods were asking us to rethink the entire process and through oral histories and how they actually communicate they normally communicate ideas and information through podcasts, WhatsApp groups and we ended up trying to develop with them a jingle that would explain an informal settlement profile the music and the words and that for me was a quite important example of them thinking you know maybe that there are these shifts in perspective sometimes that are needed on are you understanding how do we move beyond the the tools that we are used to to use and within design or planning or to think in that need to be in place or the capacities that we normally think need to be in place where sometimes maybe what is needed is a shift and actually looking at things the other way around and understanding how do we better understand the knowledge that's there the capacity that's there the communication also needs or skills that are in place locally. Thank you Beatrice and Slatter. Yeah I would like just to add a few words about this training and education and the capacities so as already been said about the government about the people about professionalism but also there is something that for example implementing agencies that are very much involved sometimes they need also to build their capacities although they are promoting this participatory approach or participatory government but also they should be part of this learning process of the process of sharing the knowledge about the participation so since that sometimes they are they have a very much influence in all these initiatives that are asking for the involvement or seeking for the moment of people. Thank you so much. Sally we have like maybe 30 seconds before we I try and draw this wide encompassing debate to a close did you want to add anything on the questions? Yeah I mean I've just been listening to the great responses but I think on just responding to Taru's question on the informal formal one of the big challenges I saw in the DACA case is that obviously when we look at development projects especially working in NGOs in the sector is quite a desirable position and what I found in the field work is that it can create quite paternalistic relationships with many informal settlement residents and quite hierarchical relationships so I think that's quite a challenge in that context and also just to flag that some of the political economy challenges like access to land and housing land especially links to the vested interests that create such big barriers to scaling participation especially in low income informal contexts with very insecure land arrangements I think land is still very important. So yeah thank you thank you Sally thank you all of the all of the speakers I just wanted to say a couple of reflections before we close because I'm committed to keeping us in time so I think for me and Aparlo you really summed it up when you described these new platforms for contestation so throughout the articles are new platforms of contestation they are absolute successes that different citizen groups have achieved sometimes historically achieved which are now weaker sometimes they were weak and are now building because of political opportunities and as as they advance then they can draw on historical experiences to be better and smarter at creating better platforms the theme of citywide comes up from seven of the articles and I myself have observed the power of working citywide from my work with slum shack dwellers international federations citywide can be important because it challenges the power of politicians that seek to play one group off another and also because it ensures that offers to one community are really known about by other communities so there's a real politics to working citywide it also in my experience helps to be build feedback loops that ensure that committed senior officials and politicians know how their efforts are played out at the local level and and really help to ensure that where there is a political will that it is taken down and not lost and not weakened not diluted I think the ability of citizens groups to who work citywide is really to begin to redefine what they mean by a planning and so to think about what kinds of plans address their needs and interests and if necessary to then negotiate those with other more powerful groups I think a number of you really touched on this theme about how academics think and act and work and you know going back perhaps to some of the comments that the two people in the very answering the very first question made Sally and Catalina about the requirements to be and think differently as academics not to lose a critical lens but to accept that being a critical outsider really doesn't progress things in this context and there is a need to deal with these messy imperfections if we are to support the groups we're trying to support an advance a world in which their needs and interests are at least met if not prioritized so thank you really thank you for your contributions to this journal and so much appreciate all the work that you did and the patience that you had with reviewer comments and editing and so much appreciated that you submitted your papers in the first instance and that you've taken place in the webinar really appreciate it we will follow up with a blog for which all of you will have a chance to look at the panel will have a chance to look at and hopefully the audience will appreciate we really do appreciate your participation and we will try and answer the questions that we have not fully answered so just a flag that this is the first of hopefully well this this is part of a long series of IID events and the IID team look forward to seeing you again but let me not keep you let me just say thank you to all the audience for taking part for for listening so assiduously and thank you to the panelists for your contributions it is much appreciated bye bye