Voicing noise: Political agency and the trialectics of participation in urban Malawi

Abstract

Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrading in Malawi, despite the fact that most projects never get beyond the planning stage. Serious participation fatigue has been identified in many areas, but little is done to change the dominant script. This article comes out of an action research project with groups of urban poor and their organizations in Malawi. It analyses existing spaces in which participatory planning and slum upgrading take place, and reflects on what combinations of participatory spaces that might serve to enable change. The authors define political agency and locate potential transformation in agonistic spaces that open up for rupture and for people's interest to be accepted as voice rather than noise. At the same time, participants in urban Malawi often wish to be included into existing frameworks rather than challenging them. The article therefore explores a third way between a programme of insurgent radical action and the more pragmatic consensus-based participation model practised in Malawi today. Here, the potential for transformation is to be found not within one group or one type of space, but in the ways in which different spaces of participation connect, overlap and partly constitute each other. To better understand the transformative potential of participation in the context of urban planning in Malawi, we thus propose a 'trialectics' of participatory spaces where 'claimed', 'invited' and 'invented' dimensions of participation connect, overlap, and open up for ways in which actors can meet.

Prevailing Approaches and Practices of Citizen Participation in Smart City Projects: Lessons from Trondheim, Norway

“…In other words, participation and power can work together by reflecting an ideal of society that is more equal and fairer with respect to plan-and decision-making [9]. In this respect, Refstie and Brun [38] argue that, in order to enable citizens' voices to be heard and affect decision-making, it is not enough to invite them into planning and decision-making processes, but they should have an opportunity to claim and invent the participation space themselves. Therefore, direct participation should be the combination of invited, claimed, and invented participation spaces.…”

Towards Citywide Participatory Planning: Emerging Community-Led Practices in Three African Cities

“…In addition, Miraftab (2009) adds a fourth category: invented spaces. These are also established by civil society groups but, unlike claimed spaces, are less institutionalised and serve to directly challenge the status quo (Refstie and Brun, 2016).…”

“…It is important to note that these different spaces of citizen participation do not stand in isolation to each other. Indeed, as highlighted by Refstie and Brun (2016), claimed, invented and invited spaces may overlap and connect; this, they suggest may lead to participation which is transformative in nature, producing urban reforms that challenge unjust practices of resource redistribution and exclusion. And, as we argue, the interplay of claimed, invented and invited spaces is also an essential precondition for scaling to occur.…”

“…In other cities of the Global South, when governments have introduced deliberative spaces without undertaking democratic reforms to enhance citizen empowerment and inclusion, participatory planning remains a symbolic exercise. This is illustrated by Refstie and Brun (2016), who noted that the participatory budgeting in Blantyre was more an information-oriented event, during which a municipal plan, developed by the government administration, was presented to residents without leaving space for consultation. Similar trends were also noted for other African cities such as Dondo and Maputo (Cabannes, 2015).…”

The Trialectics of Spatiality: The Labeling of a Historical Area in Beijing

“…Refstie and Brun applied the trialectics of spatiality to explore the different participations of different agents (including the government, international organizations and the community residents) in urban planning. The participation of different groups makes it possible to fulfill the multiple requirements from various subjects for urban planning [46]. In addition, some scholars have analyzed the perceptions and practices of subjects under the same environmental protection through the trialectics of spatiality.…”