Exploring citizens' perspectives on participatory design and planning: A comparative study across three capital cities

Participation is often employed by authorities as a unilateral tool for gathering data from citizens, informing them about processes, and obtaining legitimacy and accountability, rather than truly empowering or collaborating with citizens. However, many scholars emphasize the vital role of civic consciousness and collective intelligence (CI) in addressing chronic issues and global crises related to shared interests and values. To achieve this with effective participatory design and planning (PD&P) processes, it's essential to understand citizens' perspectives rather than imposing ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches.

We explored how citizens evaluate existing PD&P mechanisms in three capital cities: Ankara, Bogota, and Madrid, representing developed, developing, and least-developed countries. Through collective experiments using conjoint analysis, we conducted citizen interviews based on the CI genome consisting of key dimensions and attributes of PD&P for public spaces. Crowdsourcing applications were integrated to enhance field studies. Additionally, chord diagrams and scatter charts visually depict interrelations among the grouped and ranked genome attributes. Our analysis explores variations and commonalities across cities and includes reflections from students.

The results show that PD&P is perceived as significantly important, while top-down political decisions are perceived as dissatisfactory by most respondents. Notably, Madrid stands out positively in certain dimensions, including the willingness for active participation, multi-functionality as a capital, and diversity of initiatives. In addition, the political culture, respondents' education, age, and attachment to the city have significant influences on preferred methods, prioritized issues, and attitudes. Despite its limitations, conjoint analysis holds promise as a method to understand citizens' demands and design robust PD&P settings for deeper and broader involvement.