ABOUT US
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.
Aims and background
Democracy, governance and trust (DGT) are under strain worldwide while political participation – from the streets to democratic institutions – is on the rise and is widely seen as a corrective to democratic decline. This paradox – representational democracy in crisis with political participation increasing and expanding beyond voting – is most visible in cities. Most large cities worldwide are institutionalizing new participatory ecosystems that are attempting to overcome the problems of social inequality, marginalization, and discrimination. They are also the center of disputes over power and authority in both digital and non-digital spaces, which express the failures of the democratic project. Cities are key global arenas where policies and ideas circulate that promote participation and uneven territories saturated with inequality and conflicts that pose a strain on DGT.
A new generation of innovations is emerging, such as reframed participatory budgets, mini-publics, citizen-initiative-based democracy, digital city strategies, and open government initiatives. These urban participatory innovations (UPIs) share common institutional forms – e.g. smart cities or open government – and respond to similar global processes (e.g. breakdown in trust). Cities are key arenas for building the relations that make or break DGT, yet our knowledge remains dispersed across disciplines and regions and lacks an integrated, comparative, interdisciplinary and relational approach. UPI generates a new conceptual tool to develop a relational comparison, making connections between and across 7 major cities (covering 4 regions across the global south and north, where we have existing empirical research and established teams, and chosen for their feasibility, innovation and diversity. Each city has promoted one or more UPIs in recent years. Together, they provide a global perspective on how and why cities and urban space matter to theories of DGT.
PAR-CITY brings together, for the first time, a unique interdisciplinary set of 25 researchers – from geography, legal studies, media studies, public administration, political theory, political science, sociology, gender studies, and urban studies – to examine how and why cities respond to key democratic challenges of our times.
Urban participatory innovations (UPIs) are ‘a set of practices, inventions and devices implemented by professional political actors, citizens or interest groups and aiming at changing more or less radically what is usually perceived as “politics as usual” in representative democracy’ (Alexandre-Collier et al, 2020, 16), organized around urban localities and lines of belonging and oriented around enhancing or modifying political participation in and through cities. Although studies of democratic innovations and governance are proliferating (Bua and Bussu, 2023; Elstub and Escobar, 2019; Smith, 2009; Saward, 2004) they rarely dialogue with urban studies (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017) or literature on trust and do so in highly selective ways. PAR-CITY builds a new, relational approach to DGT by: (i) integrating thus-far fragmented disciplinary approaches to understanding participatory innovations, (ii) centering the role of geography and urban space; and (iii) drawing on a global set of empirical vantage points.
The research teams will address three central research questions (RQs), which respond to the chosen DGT themes:
RQ1. How are urban participatory innovations (UPIs) reshaping power, authority, and conflict?
RQ2. How do UPIs confront marginalization and inequalities?
RQ3. How do concepts, understandings, and practices of UPIs relate across geographical
differences?
Methodology
Co-PIs will lead the research through the lens of their city and its central UPIs. As a starting point, we have identified four clusters of UPIs (smart cities; open government; citizen engagement; grassroots initiatives) with at least one city from the global north and south providing an empirical case study per cluster. This typology has been used for case study selection purposes and will not provide rigid conceptual boundaries for our data collection. Each city has been chosen based on three core criteria:
(i) feasibility: we have existing teams of researchers, data-sets of previous fieldwork, and capacity to address the research questions; (ii) innovation: each city presents “flagship” UPIs that provide empirical and theoretical insights into DGT; (iii) diversity: our cities present sufficient heterogeneity in terms of geographical location (global north and south), size (among large cities), demographic makeup, and type of innovation.
PAR-CITY builds on existing research and incorporates new empirical work as defined by city (see below). We approach the three themes and our RQs in an integral way across all seven cities. Methods span: qualitative document analysis (e.g., content from city institutions and civic organizations, governmental official documents); qualitative analysis of social media content; qualitative and quantitative analysis of digital participatory innovations; in-depth interviews with city residents, activists and representatives and long-term ethnographies in online and offline urban spaces.
PAR-CITY’s originality is to place ideas, findings, and analyses in a relational comparison that draws on the wealth of expertise from across 9 disciplines and 7 countries. Equality, diversity and inclusion considerations are embedded in both the thematic, logistical and conceptual aspects of our proposal as well as the composition of our teams. This includes allowing flexibility for those with child care arrangements, incorporating a balance of early-career and senior researchers in all teams, supporting marginalized institutions and/or researchers in all teams. The core research questions all interrogate issues of equity, for example, as well as the ways that diverse populations living in urban spaces come together to engage in participatory innovations.
The RQs and objectives are operationalised through two Work Streams (WSs) which are designed to deepen collaboration across cities and institutions across the Atlantic basin and global north and south and provide a format for building a relational comparison across our disciplines and places of study.
Position in the context of existing research
PAR-CITY will reshape disciplinary landscapes by establishing the significance of urban space and uneven geographies for how democracy is understood and operationalized. Our reshaping of disciplinary landscapes is summarized through expected contributions to debates on democracy, governance and trust.
Democracy
PAR-CITY opens theoretical dialogue between recent advances in urban studies with institutional and political science approaches to democracy. Cities have a central place in democratic scholarship, historically due to the founding Western concept of the demos as city-state and geographically as the site where most democracy “happens”. Yet the relationship between the two remains under-researched (Beveridge & Koch, 2022). Democracy is forged at multiple scales and through diffuse networks, yet cities and urbanism are rarely placed center stage of analysis. Notably, although literature in urban governance (e.g. Kearns & Paddison, 2000; Elwood, 2004; Keivani & Mattingly, 2007) and democratic innovations (Elstrub & Escobar, 2019) are relatively advanced: they are rarely put into dialogue. Urban democracy remains under-theorised in spatial and urban terms. For example, scholarship has considered why people participate (e.g. vote, protest) by considering the conditions that make it more likely to happen. Certain resources, including social capital, alongside material and psychological incentives, encourage individuals to become politically active (Putnam, 2000; Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993; Whiteley & Seyd, 2002), and may also be responsible for lack of participation (Aytaç, & Stokes, 2018). Organizations (political parties, social movements) mobilize people, especially if they provide a shared identity and represent demands (Han, 2014).
Democratic institutions also promote participatory agendas as they seek to enhance their legitimacy, as some city governments have shown (Barber, 2013). What is missing is explicit appreciation tha where participation takes place is likely to influence both how and why participation unfolds. Previous studies have approached questions of difference and inequality by generating snapshots of who participates in different forms of political engagement, from activism to policy reform, highlighting factors such as gender, class, religion and ethnicity with regards to the form and extent of participation (e.g. Burns et al, 2001; Espinal & Shanyang, 2015; Marien et al, 2010; Dalton, 2017). Rarely do such studies examine the role of geographical context, they thereby miss a key source of inequality and political participation. Although sociologists analyze UPIs, especially in the context of deliberative democracy, there is a lack of comparative work that incorporates a territorial perspective. While existing research focuses on selected issues, our project makes possible comprehensive comparisons of socio-cultural conditions across diverse cities, thus creating an analysis model independent of the local context.
Governance
A second major contribution is to establish the relationality and diversity of participatory governance innovations as uneven processes that rarely conform to one typology, concept or idea.
Literature on participatory governance innovations has rapidly grown in recent years, yet remains 14 highly segmented according to disciplinary and conceptual interests. For example, literature examines how political parties are innovating renewed forms of participation to deal with the crisis of militant commitment (Scarrow, 2015; Gauja, 2016), but does little to explore how the “participatory turn” is affecting the attitudes of elected rulers in these parties. Studies of democratic innovations tend to focus on specific organizations, e.g. social movements (Della Porta, 2020) or repertoires (e.g. voting), rarely examined in dialogue with governance mechanisms.
Literature on digital participation also indicates disconnected perspectives. Social movement scholars focus on digital activism as a geographically embedded practice, but across simplistic online vs. offline binaries (Vasi & Suh, 2016; Dahlberg-Grundberg & Örestig, 2017, Van Haperen et al, 2018). Studies of youth activism and online participation tend to examine national-level politics or selected protests (Literat et al. 2018; Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik 2019, 28; Jenkins et al, 2016; Highfield, 2016), downplaying everyday involvement in urban communities for building agency, civic awareness and communication skills (Kock & Villadsen, 2017). PAR-CITY bridges divides between institutional and non-institutional politics, and offline/online spaces of governance, creating dialogue across studies of participatory governance that work from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. It engages cutting edge research on the intersection of institutions and grassroots organization, e.g. “movement parties” (Della Porta, 2020) “embedded” participation in “democracy-driven governance” (Bua & Bussu, 2023), “bureaucratic activism” (Abers, 2019), “post-participatory” institutions (Lavalle, 2011), and grassroots institutional channels (Anciano and Piper 2018).
Building on such approaches, PAR-CITY will generate a relational account of participation in governance that acknowledges geographical context (Miller, 2000) and responds to recent calls to study the heterogeneous and overlapping drivers of new democratic institutions and governance practices (McGuirk et al 2022).
Trust
A third major contribution is understanding how UPIs reshape trust. Multidimensionality of trust is based on the different levels of social life; trust in political actors, public institutions or fellow citizens can vary (Boulianne 2019). UPIs can positively impact citizens’ trust and engagement (Dyck, 2009; Boulianne 2018, 2019, Ehs & Mokre 2021, Setälä et al. 2021). However, it remains necessary to examine how trust works across the institutional/non-institutional gap and via digitally mediated practices of democracy. Recent studies of open government policies highlight their potential for enhancing transparency, participation and accountability. By bringing transparency about public budgets, data, officials and politicians to citizens, open government seeks to enhance institutional trust (Bueno et al., 2016; Gonzálvez-Gallego et al., 2020). But while there has been a significant growth in research, there remain conceptual ambiguities and a dearth of empirical evidence about its effects (Tai, 2021). PAR-CITY re-evaluates trust in modern urban communities due to their increasing complexity, ever-widening areas of uncertainty and the dominance of risk (Macnish & Galliott, 2020). Smart city technologies are forging new pathways of participation (Townsend, 2013; Batty, 2013) and city authorities rely on the trust, responsibility and agency of urban citizens (Magnusson, 2015; Butzlaff, 2023; Schmidthuber, Ingrams & Hilgers, 2021; Angelico, 2023): yet the outcomes remain understudied. Building on previous findings on trust in democracy (Warren, 1999; Zmerli et al. 2017; Norris, 2022), we will explore new issues of trust in UPIs, such as the use of big data in urban policy design and governance (Macnish & Galliott, 2020; Kersting, 2016; Kundu, 2019), citizens’ trust in technology, data security, and digital literacy (Alshehri and Drew 2010).
A key focus of PAR-CITY is thus re-evaluating how digital technologies, central to UPIs, are generating new opportunities and challenges for democratic trust. Many parts of traditional urban life, such as using infrastructure, obtaining housing and shelter and even basic interactions with the state are now mediated through digital means, leading to an inherent loss of privacy and concerns about data governance and use. Although well studied, what is missing is explicit and systematic attention to how digital participation, including via smart city planning (Levenda et al 2020) is deepening or eroding trust in urban democracy and governance.
Added value of the trans-Atlantic partnership
Twenty-five researchers from seven countries in northern and southern cities across nine disciplines representing the humanities and social sciences come together for the first time to confront a shared concern: how are urban participatory innovations responding to democratic crises and challenges of trust and governance? Each Co-PI brings their existing research, established local partnerships and a considerable track record in published research, engagement, and institution-building.
The partnership provides resources and a clear programme to facilitate dialogue and integrate researchers and case studies into a unified project. In South Africa’s case, it also strengthens collaboration and equitable distribution of resources between a historically privileged (UCT) and a historically disadvantaged institution (UWC). It builds on existing research strengths to generate a new theoretical and methodological framework based on two interrelated work streams. It will produce new mobilities of ideas and people in the expectation that frameworks are both sensitive to local particularities but also able to reach across a range of contexts. Many practices and studies are limited to local languages and epistemological frameworks, which prevents a full exchange of experiences.
This trans-Atlantic exchange will establish dialogue across boundaries (disciplinary, linguistic, epistemological, cultural and political) and co-produce academic and non-academic information to disseminate widely in several regions of the world. Drawing on global experts, it will share and disseminate relative success of UPIs worldwide. By building on existing research and data sets, PAR-CITY is not starting from zero, and thus reduces the inefficient cost of starting up new research in cities.
The opportunity to confront and compare northern and southern perspectives, concepts and implemented practices in different political and cultural contexts is particularly fruitful. Another unique aspect of the partnership is the nature of the varied academic institutions represented, which will enrich the consortia through academic experiences and generate an equitable distribution of resources, responsibilities, efforts and benefits. Our researchers work at very different kinds of universities around the world, public and private, large and small. For example, several of the researchers work at minority-serving institutions, such as Brooklyn College (a designated AANAPI-serving institution and emerging Hispanic-serving institution), the City University of New York Graduate Center (a Hispanic-serving institution), UWC (a Historically Disadvantaged Institution in South Africa) and Queen Mary University of London (situated in a working-class and ethnically diverse neighborhood).
Others work at primarily undergraduate institutions, such as Franklin and Marshall College, or at major public institutions that serve low-income students, such as Federal University of São Paulo and University of Lyon 2. The Polish Academy of Sciences, on the other hand, is a research institute focused on developing the careers of doctoral and postdoctoral students. The diversity of perspectives we bring to the study of DGT plays a critically important role in building and cross-checking our comparative analyses.