A Bottom-Up and Top-Down Participatory Approach to Planning and Designing Local Urban Development: Evidence from an Urban University Center

Abstract

The urban area is characterized by different urban ecosystems that interact with different institutional levels, including different stakeholders and decision-makers, such as public administrations and governments. This can create many institutional conflicts in planning and designing the urban space. It would arguably be ideal for an urban area to be planned like a socio-ecological system where the urban ecosystem and institutional levels interact with each other in a multi-scale analysis. This work embraces a planning process that aims at being applied to a multi-institutional level approach that is able to match different visions and stakeholders' needs, combining bottom-up and top-down participation approaches. At the urban scale, the use of this approach is sometimes criticized because it appears to increase conflicts between the different stakeholders. Starting from a case study in the Municipality of Lecce, South Italy, we apply a top-down and bottom-up participation approach to overcome conflicts at the institutional levels in the use of the urban space in the Plan of the Urban University Center. The bottom-up participation action analyzes the vision of people that frequent the urban context. After that, we share this vision in direct comparison with decision-makers to develop the planning and design solutions. The final result is a draft of the hypothetical Plan of the Urban University Center. In this way, the bottom-up and top-down approaches are useful to match the need of the community that uses the area with the vision of urban space development of decision-makers, reducing the conflicts that can arise between different institutional levels. In this study, it also emerges that the urban question is not green areas vs. new buildings, but it is important to focus on the social use of the space to develop human well-being. With the right transition of information and knowledge between different institutional levels, the bottom-up and top-down approaches help develop an operative effective transdisciplinary urban plan and design. Therefore, public participation with bottom-up and top-down approaches is not a tool to obtain maximum consensus, but mainly a moment of confrontation to better address social issues in urban planning and design.

Development, urban planning and political decisions. A triad that built territories at risk

“…That is why the paradigm shift towards systemic risk management is necessary, defining approaches under an integrative vision that allows the development of clear and timely policy responses aimed at coexisting and managing uncertainty for reducing the effects of the disaster. The urban and territorial governance has understood as an action model based on the interaction among multi-actors, oriented towards a systematic process of transformation (Semeraro et al 2020 ).…”

Integration of Ecosystem Services in Strategic Environmental Assessment of a Peri-Urban Development Plan

“…The definitions of the environmental goals started with consideration of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [26]. Afterwards, we analyzed the relationships with other relevant plans (at different spatial tiers) by comparing the objectives/actions of the plan and the guidelines/forecasts of other plans (external consistency analysis) [27]. This is important because the SEA process needs to analyze the coherence between the peri-urban plan with PPP strategies of different administrative levels and scales, as stated by international and national directives and laws.…”

“…However, the presence of community gardens can improve social aspects like psychological well-being, reinforcing the sense of community with respect the actual status [76]. In a social-ecological system, it is important to have not only these cultural elements but also the accessibility and possibility of stakeholders using them [27]. GI supports maintaining the cultural agricultural value.…”

A Conceptual Framework to Design Green Infrastructure: Ecosystem Services as an Opportunity for Creating Shared Value in Ground Photovoltaic Systems

“…Several activities compete for the same space (e.g., infrastructure, agriculture, energy production, recreation) and multifunctional land use represents an approach that is instrumental in combining several activities on the same area. This approach, coupled with appropriate landscape design solutions, is conceived as a strategy that, besides supporting primary functions (i.e., food, fibres and other production), provides secondary services to the community, such as biodiversity conservation, support for socioeconomic activities of rural areas, improved flood mitigation, and the quality and safety of production [34][35][36][37][38][39]. This is coherent with the indications of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, promoting "win-win solutions for energy generation" like solar-panel farms that provide biodiversity-friendly soil cover [40].…”