Theorizing Public Participation in Urban Governance. Toward a New Normal Planning

During the last decade, much planning and urban governance research have investigated extensive- and small-scale experiments to design and establish new models for citizens' participation and collaborative planning. These models have generally focused on practices for engaging citizens in specific local contexts and projects. This chapter develops a theory about public participation drawing from a tradition of deliberative democracy, collaborative, and pragmatic planning to help understand and advance participatory methods in new normal planning. The questions address how we can understand public participation as the intelligence of planning and a normalized practice, and how researchers can perform participation planning as a way of knowing, creating spaces of knowledge deliberation. Our experience as researchers dealing with the co-production of knowledge on air quality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Aalborg is presented here with its diverse participation practice and mutual learning. The chapter concludes by identifying the essential role of planning research in facilitating, mediating, and acting as interlocutors of participation processes in the new normal.