Participation in the City: How Urban Participatory Innovations are Reshaping Democracy, Governance and Trust (PAR-CITY)

Abstract

In an era of eroding democratic freedoms and withering trust in electoral democracy, innovations in political participation are pivotal to democracy's survival in the 21st century. Cities have been a key source of urban participatory innovations (UPIs): new practices and mechanisms through which citizens inform and reshape democratic institutions. UPIs include both grassroots attempts to use physical (e.g. public squares) and digital (e.g. social media) urban spaces to build trust and reshape democracy, as well as institutional reforms such as open government and participatory design of institutions. Yet cities are also sites of political conflict and deep inequalities that express the failures of the democratic project. PAR-CITY brings together, for the first time, a unique interdisciplinary set of 25 researchers to examine how and why cities respond to the key democratic challenges of our times. PAR-CITY will undertake a relational comparison of 7 major cities (covering 4 regions across the global south and north): where we have existing empirical research and established teams. Each city has been chosen due to its promotion of one or more UPIs in recent years and will address the same central research questions in order to achieve three objectives. First, PAR-CITY will establish the empirical significance of cities for responding to the global challenges of democracy, governance and trust (DGT). Second, the project will examine the role of digital media, tools and technologies in eroding or strengthening DGT in large cities. Third, the project will advance concepts, models and theories of DGT through the central notion of UPI. At the end of the three-year period, the team will have shifted disciplinary landscapes by centering the role of cities and UPIs in studies of DGT, drawing new relations between disciplines and geographical contexts, producing a co-authored book, several journal articles and a digital platform. (AU)