PAR-CITY at LASA2026 in Paris

Paris, May 2026.- PAR-CITY was represented at the LASA2026 International Congress in Paris through a series of panels and discussions on urban participatory innovations, popular participation, participatory budgeting and urban democracy.

A central contribution was the project panel ‘Participation in the City: How Urban Participatory Innovations are Reshaping Power and Democracy’, organised by Sam Halvorsen. The panel brought together ongoing collective work from PAR-CITY, exploring how urban participatory innovations (UPIs) reshape power relations, democratic practices and forms of governance across different urban contexts.

The panel approached cities as key arenas in which inequality, conflict, everyday survival and democratic experimentation converge. Rather than treating participation as either institutional reform or grassroots mobilisation, the papers examined its complex connections with urban governance, informality, digital engagement, territorial struggles and power. Across the session, the discussion focused on how UPIs can cultivate solidarities across fractured urban landscapes, produce ruptures in existing forms of governance, and open new possibilities for more democratic urban futures.

Sam Halvorsen presented ‘From Urban Democracy to Urban Power: Reframing Participation in the City’, co-authored with Ross Beveridge, Cristina Temenos and Fiona Anciano. The paper introduced a conceptual shift from normative understandings of urban democracy towards a more relational and power-sensitive account of urban power.

Stephanie L. McNulty presented ‘Scales of Financial Power: Participatory Budgeting and Inequality in Comparative Perspective’, co-authored with Benjamin Goldfrank, Álvaro Pereira, and Celina Su. The paper examined how UPIs intersect with financial power, redistribution, austerity and multi-scalar urban governance.

Sebastian Mauro presented ‘UPIs in a Polarising World’, co-authored with Agnieszka Kampka and Zac Spicer. The paper explored how participatory innovations operate in contexts marked by ideological division, distrust and exclusionary politics, drawing on cases from Argentina, Poland and Canada.

The panel also included ‘UPIs as Ecosystems of Power’, by Gabriela de Brelaz, Guillaume Gourges and Alina Ribeiro, presented by Gabriela de Brelaz. The paper conceptualised UPIs as complex ecosystems of power, embedded in wider urban governance arrangements and sustained through communication, feedback loops, institutional relations and flows of resources.

The session’s discussant was Benjamin Goldfrank, whose comments helped situate the papers within broader debates on participation, democracy and power in Latin American cities.

PAR-CITY was also strongly represented in the panel ‘Participatory Budgeting Around the World: Comparative Perspectives and Emerging Challenges’, organised by Guillaume Gourgues and chaired by Stephanie L. McNulty. The panel placed participatory budgeting within wider debates on democratic deepening, urban governance and the global circulation of participatory innovations. Contributions examined participatory budgeting in France, Peru, New York City and Brazil, as well as the circulation of Portuguese- language knowledge on PB presented by Luiza Jardim in cooperation with Alina Ribeiro, Gabriela de Brelaz and Fabiano Angelico. By bringing together comparative perspectives, the session contributed to PAR-CITY’s broader interest in how participatory innovations travel, transform and endure across different political and urban contexts.

In addition, PAR-CITY researchers took part in the roundtable ‘Popular Participation in Latin American Cities’, organised and chaired by Sebastian Mauro. The congress also featured a session on Sam Halvorsen’s forthcoming book, Territorializing Democracy: Strategies of Popular Participation in Buenos Aires, to be published by the University of Georgia Press. 

Together, these sessions reflected the breadth of PAR-CITY’s research agenda and its contribution to current debates on democracy, governance, trust and urban power. LASA2026 offered an important opportunity to share emerging ideas from the project, strengthen comparative conversations and connect PAR-CITY’s work with wider discussions on participation in Latin American cities and beyond.