Producing and Contesting Meanings of Participation in Planning
The Case of Singapore (1985-2020)
Jan H.M. Lim (KU Leuven), Angeliki Paidakaki (KU Leuven), Han Verschure (KU Leuven), & Pieter Van Den Broeck (KU Leuven)
When Sherry Arnstein published the seminal article “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” in 1969, she conceptualized participation in terms of varying rungs of power – the power to make planning decisions. In her worldview, participation was inherently political. Today, public participation is part and parcel of many planning and development processes and can be used in conflicting ways, subverting existing power structures and relations in some instances, while affirming them in others. The question then is, what does it mean to “participate”? What and whose objectives and interests does participation serve? What are the democratic principles guiding participation?
In Singapore, a Southeast Asian city-state of about 5,45 million people at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, participatory forms of urban planning have been adopted by the state government since the 1980s. This may be surprising to some, since Singapore has often been associated with various labels such as “soft authoritarianism”, “hybrid regime”, and “illiberal democracy”. Although Singapore has a multi-party parliamentary system, the People’s Action Party has continually ruled the nation since 1959, retaining its dominant position in politics and society to the present day. The party strongly defends its approach to democratic governance (one involving overt state intervention and restrictions on certain civil liberties) as an “Asian” alternative to the liberal democracy of the West. Against this backdrop, the ruling party and its administration have implemented various public sector reforms over the years, opening up spaces for citizen involvement in urban planning and redevelopment.
In our article, we asked: What does participation and participatory planning mean in a country like Singapore? How is the idea of participation understood or represented there, specifically in planning discourse? We wanted to investigate whether the Singapore government has attempted to frame participation in planning in ways that bolster its political dominance – as opposed to relinquishing part of it. At the same time, we also sought to uncover whether others have tried to redefine participation in planning in their own ways, and if they have had an impact on the democratization of planning and governance in doing so.
To answer these questions, we analyzed 312 documents from both state and nonstate sources over the course of 35 years, from the mid-1980s (when the national planning agency of Singapore, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, first adopted a more consultative approach) to 2020. These documents included planning reports and guidelines; periodicals; thematic publications; transcripts of interviews, speeches and parliamentary debates; academic publications; press releases; presentation decks; planning (counter)proposals and position papers; news articles, commentaries, and letters to the press; blog posts and websites of informal citizen groups; and reports by government-appointed citizen committees.
We discovered that spaces and moments for more democratic planning and governance were gradually created amidst the continuous tussle among different individuals and organizations, who were seeking to depoliticize or repoliticize participation on their own terms. We saw two main coalitions producing different interpretations of participation in planning. One coalition was primarily led by those traditionally identified as part of the state (government authorities and ruling party politicians), while also including others outside the state (citizens, community groups and private-sector stakeholders). The second coalition was led by civil society organizations, public intellectuals, informal citizen groups and other individuals.
The state-led coalition sought to make the notion of participation (and participatory planning) compatible with the ruling party’s brand of democratic-authoritarian politics. Aligning participation with state-defined national interests, this coalition conceived participation as a means to enhance the nation’s economic growth and competitiveness, as well as citizens’ sense of nationhood. Participation was less about influencing planning decisions, and more about shaping the city into an attractive place to live and work, and letting citizens feel emotionally attached to the relatively young nation-state.
Along the way, the nonstate-led coalition was partly successful in injecting alternative meanings of participation. These were centered around activism, advocacy, conflicts and contestations over planning agendas and decisions. Over time, such ideas of participation gained greater legitimacy in society, although they were continually tamed and remolded into more consensual, and less adversarial, procedures by the state. The state’s reframing of participation became a way for it to manage planning activism, retain control of decision-making, and stabilize the existing political system and power relations.
What do all these findings mean? They show that participation in planning is fundamentally political, not only in how agendas are set and decisions are made, but also in the ways in which the idea of participation itself is produced. The case of Singapore demonstrates how the democratic basis of participation can be reconciled with the authoritarian tendencies of Singapore’s unique political environment, although this reconciliation is always temporary, susceptible to contestation, and in need of continuous maintenance by those in power.
Learning to see “participation” as an idea that can be – and has been – imagined and reimagined has profound implications for planners, participation practitioners, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and activists. One major implication is that the terms and boundaries of participation can and do shift. They can be contested and made more (or less) political, through actions as well as discourses. The act of (re)defining these terms and boundaries is a form of both political power and human agency, and we need to critically question what it means to participate, and for what and whose ends. We hope our findings may inspire new ways of reframing and restrategizing future approaches to participatory planning and planning activism, in ways that allow the true diversity of values, priorities, and views of the public interest to emerge.
Jan H. M. Lim is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture (Planning & Development research unit) at KU Leuven, Belgium. She is also the co-founder and director of research and strategy at Participate in Design (P!D), a Singapore-based nonprofit organization that advocates and implements participatory approaches to urban design and planning processes. Her research examines the sociopolitics of participatory planning with the aim of informing future strategies for practice.
Angeliki Paidakaki is an urban researcher with an expertise in egalitarian urban development, governance innovations, and affordable housing in (post-)crisis times. Since 2018, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, where her 2017 PhD dissertation was awarded the University's highest distinction. In 2020, she was awarded the Fulbright-Schuman grant to conduct research on the politics of housing alliances in the USA. As of October 2022, she will be an assistant professor at the Geography Department of the Harokopio University of Athens.
Han Verschure is professor emeritus at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium, where he was the program director for Master of Architecture in Human Settlements from 1985 to 2007. He has 50 years of professional experience in training and capacity building, policymaking, research, and the development of projects in over 28 developing countries, specializing in habitat, sustainable urban and rural settlement development, urban renewal and heritage conservation, and spatial and environmental planning.
Pieter Van den Broeck is associate professor of Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development in the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven, where he leads the Planning & Development research unit. He has over 20 years of experience in spatial development analysis and planning, in both research and practice. From a critical institutionalist perspective and a methodological interest in transdisciplinary action research, he engages in research on planning instruments, social innovation, territorial development, governance of socioecological systems, and land dynamics and commons.