Our research

Urban Participatory Innovations (UPIs)

UPI 1: Open government

Open government initiatives are analyzed in this project as Urban Participatory Innovations and aim to promote transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in government activities. These initiatives can occur at the local (municipal), state, provincial, and national levels, encourage governments to share data, foster open dialogues with citizens, and implement policies that enhance democratic engagement and accountability. By making information accessible, governments enhance transparency, help build trust between governments and their citizens, aiming to improve service delivery, and ensure that public resources are used effectively and ethically. Countries worldwide are adopting these principles through tools such as open data portals, participatory budgeting, and anti-corruption measures to create more inclusive and responsive governance.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a global multilateral initiative that brings together governments and civil society organizations to promote open government reforms. Launched in 2011 by eight national governments and nine civil society organizations, the OGP aims to foster collaborative solutions to common governance challenges by encouraging countries to develop and implement Action Plans that detail commitments to transparency, citizen participation, and anti-corruption measures. Member countries voluntarily set goals co-created with civil society, report progress and limitations, and share best practices, creating a dynamic network of reformers dedicated to making governments more open and accountable. These initiatives are monitored by the Independent Reporting Mechanism, which assesses if and how the compromises are achieved. Some cities implement Open Government initiatives that do not follow the OGP model. In this research, we will analyze four cities implementing open government initiatives. São Paulo and Buenos Aires, which joined OGP in 2016, New York, which joined OGP in 2024, and Toronto, where Open Government efforts date back to 2009 and is not part of OGP.

  • Buenos Aires

  • New York City

  • São Paulo

  • Toronto

  1. To what extent is the co-creation of action plans inclusive?
  2. Who participates?
  3. Do the compromises in the action plans created include participation policies?
  4. How is technology used in the process to strengthen or limit participation?
  5. Are those digitally excluded also part of the process?
  6. What are the short and long-term impacts of Open Government initiatives?
  7. How does this initiative affect participatory governance?

Coordination: Gabriela De Brelaz
Researchers: TBC

UPI 2: Participatory Neighbourhood Upgrading

Participatory neighborhood upgrading (PNU) responds to an impetus driven by informal neighborhood policies (Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Cape Town) and further incorporates a post-socialist urban context. PNU is a process of improving urban environments, through infrastructural, environmental and social transformations, that embeds participation as a policy device (top-down) and or through community organisation (bottom-up). It provides a vantage point into how democracy, governance and trust are being reformulated through major processes of urban renewal.

  • Buenos Aires

  • Cape Town

  • São Paulo

  • Warsaw

  • Thematic areas covered: Urbanisation, participatory governance, grassroots mobilisation 

  • Main research questions guiding the UPI: 

    1. How are PNUs  reshaping power, authority, and conflict?

    2. How do PNUs confront marginalization and inequalities?

Coordination: Sam Halvorsen
Researchers: Anna Selmeczi, Fiona Anciano, Eliana Persky, Barry Lewis, Sam Halvorsen, Agnieszka Kampka, Camila Saraiva.

Halvorsen, S., 2024 ‘Slum upgrading and participation: Insights from a marginalized neighbourhood in Buenos Aires’, Habitat International, 153, November 2024, online.

UPI 3: Participatory Budgeting

UPI 3 proposes a relational comparison of participatory budgets (PB) in several cities. The aim of this comparison is not simply to compare the differences between PBs, nor to seek to establish a hierarchy between them (the most inclusive, innovative, and sophisticated). Our aim is to understand the trajectories, re-compositions and evolutions of PBs based on common research questions (see below). The comparison aims to situate each case study within economic, political, cultural or migratory networks, better grasping the common issues but also the differences between the cases. In this way, the seniority, procedural design, changes and controversies of each PB will be studied according to the specific situation of each case, established in relation to the others. This comparison will make it possible to go beyond a fixed comparison between the cases, based on their objective differences, to compare urban democratic innovation in a more dynamic way – the same trends in a priori most-different contexts.

  • Lyon
  • New York City
  • São Paulo
  • Warsaw
  •  
  • Thematic areas covered: Social justice, inequalities, trust, politics, power
  • Main research questions guiding the UPI: 
    1. How and to what extent does the issue of social inequalities (in participation, redistribution) call PBs into question? 
    2. How and to what extent do they reflect social conflict in the city? 
    3. How are PBs part of a local democratic ecosystem that fuels controversy over their operation? 
    4. What do they tell us about the changing ways in which one govern the city?

Coordination: Guillaume Gourgues
Researchers: Rocío Annunziata, Gabriela de Brelaz, Alvaro Luis Dos Santos Pereira, Benjamin Goldfrank, Agnieszka Kampka, Ewa Modrzejewska Stephanie Mcnulty, Jessica Sainty, Celina Su

UPI 4: DIGITALLY MEDIATED CONTENTIOUS POLITICS

This UPI examines the relationship between digital participatory ecosystems and NIMBY urban politics. Digital participatory ecosystems include both institutional and non-institutional channels that involve varying levels of citizen participation, while NIMBYism involves territorial strategies of urban control that are often, yet not necessarily, exclusionary.

This UPI speaks to the current global urban conjuncture that involves varying combinations of: insurgency (populist) right wing movements; growing social, political and economic polarisation; the roll-out of often technocratic digital (participatory) channels; scalar conflicts regarding urban governance. Methodologically, our research involves mixed methods, including: participant observation (online and offline) with NIMBY groups; discourse analysis (including of social media); analysis of urban policy; interviews and surveys. We aim to generate relational urban comparisons that speak to our shifting conjuncture and draw out (dis)continuities across territories and scales.

  • Buenos Aires
  • Calgary
  • Toronto
  • Warsaw
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Our guiding questions is: 

How are digital participatory ecosystems reconfiguring contentious NIMBY politics and, in turn, how is this reconfiguring power, democracy and trust in the city? 

Further research questions we explore include:

How are NIMBY urban conflicts reshaping the democratic potentials of digital participation? 

What are the digital participatory ecosystems in each city? How are they constituted, and what are the power relations that shape them? 

How does the NIMBY-digital intersection respond to, or reshape populist right urban politics?

Are digital channels creating new forms of urban participation and control? 

Coordination:  Zachary Spicer, Byron Miller
Researchers: Krystian Gajewski, Sam Halvorsen, Sebastian Mauro, Ewa Modrzejewska, Agnieszka Kampka

UPI 5: Grassroots Alliances and Community Organising

UPI5 focuses on participatory praxes of more or less organised collectives or residents in and across the cities involved, spanning from social movements to broader alliances of unions and movements, to informal and spontaneous formations that seek to shape the urban governance of shared resources and opportunities. Through mutual aid and other forms of solidarity, and/or through challenging, disrupting, and/or utilising existing channels of participation in urban governance, they expose spatialised socio-economic and/or political inequality and marginality, and devise innovative and experimental modes of activism, democratic participation and intervention. Case studies include the Cape Town-based social movement, Reclaim the City and the loose mutual aid-based Community Action Networks (CANs), as well as the People’s Plan in NYC.

  • Cape Town

  • Lyon

  • New York City

  •  
  • Thematic areas covered: solidarity, agonistic politics, occupation (as a spatial and political practice), grassroots critique of participation, racialised urban inequality, among others.  
  • Main research questions guiding the UPI:
    1. How are urban participatory innovations (UPIs) reshaping power, authority, and conflict? 
    2. How do UPIs confront marginalization and inequalities?

Coordination: Celina Su  and  Anna Selmeczi 

Researchers: Hélène Balazard, Fiona Anciano, Saratu Mshelia, James Clacherty, Jessica Sainty