The Power of Empowerment: Some Questions On Using Old and New ICT
The starting point is the emergent issue of complexity in the urban organization and governance tha has to take into account the even more pervasive use of the New Communication and Information Technologies (NICT).
At the time of the on-field experience it doesn’t seem that using NICT had an effective role: on one hand, beside the diffused technical and informational practices in the field of core services like public transport or health care, much more still remain to do in order to increase the effectiveness on ICT on Urban Planning and Design; on the other hand a need for a different reading of planner’s figure was soaring.
Another issue was related about the fact that in small communities and minor geographic places, planner’s actions often don’t have enough time and resources in both quality and quantity. The cultural context directly influences the evolution of those dynamics and in this paper we wanted to take into account the Italian situation by the case study of Selargius local Administration in Sardinia (Italy) aming that the conclusions made can be extended to a more large context.
At the time of the on-field experience it doesn’t seem that using NICT had an effective role: on one hand, beside the diffused technical and informational practices in the field of core services like public transport or health care, much more still remain to do in order to increase the effectiveness on ICT on Urban Planning and Design; on the other hand a need for a different reading of planner’s figure was soaring.
Another issue was related about the fact that in small communities and minor geographic places, planner’s actions often don’t have enough time and resources in both quality and quantity. The cultural context directly influences the evolution of those dynamics and in this paper we wanted to take into account the Italian situation by the case study of Selargius local Administration in Sardinia (Italy) aming that the conclusions made can be extended to a more large context.
Subject Area and Operative Context; some Issues and a Little of History
Involvement and participation are main pillars on which is based the model of european governance (European Commission, 2001), which provides the use of methods, techniques and instruments to encourage the citizens participation to public programs, plans and designs even through the use of NTIC, in order to encourage e-government and e-democracy experiences.In a more specific meaning e-democracy focuses only on modalities of use of information technologies to support community partecipation during the decisional processes and their development.
It’s well worth to remember that since 20 years ago, during the second half of the ‘80, some telematic networks spread up in the western cost of Usa and Canada further called community networks.
A civic network can be defined as a telematic space which aims to promote and encourage comunication, cooperation, distribution of services between citizens and all those subjects (associations, public, factories) who constitute the local community and, at the same time, to open local community a network communication with the world so to grant the right of telematic citizens.
This new attempt to gather a society, stressing on local culture and on the sense of belonging, starts to influence the urban development moving the barycentre towards the on-line dimension by widening and contracting it thanks to its new “digital essential being”.
The new chances of empowerment for democratic processes, that the new information and comunication technologies can offer gave a real possibility to run the idea of a “digital city” where suppling highly innovative and technological services within community networks drove the process of transformation of urban activities.
The most important features of community networks can be summarized as follows (Shuler, 1994):
- To increase community participation to the civic network itself,
- To encourage telematic democracy in the community
- To encrease transparent relationships between institution and citizens
- To let disadvantaged subjects or phisical unable subjects to take part to the community life
- Faster delivering of information in the community
In Europe the phenomenon started spreading in the anglosaxon area and in northern Europe (Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Nuremberg, Milan).
Thanks to the world wide web the real city boundaries had an expansion into an augmented dimension where time and space interact according to laws which do not follow the traditional way.
In 1995 Arthur Rheingold wrote an article where he appears confident about the possibility for a strong virtual community to “...help defend the integrity of real-world communities” starting by the experience of Amsterdam.
The European Commission itself promoted the IMAGINE project (Integrated Multimedia Applications Generating Innovative Networks in digital European towns), involving four cities different about cultural and social aspects, numerous leader companies in ICT, middle and little local firms and researchers from Universities, with the aim to develop an european model of digital city.
The participating cities were: Casale Monferrato (Italy), Parthenay (France), Torgau and Weinstadt (Germany)(Biolghini et al.,1999).
The phenomenon of digital cities in 1995 spread out also in Italy thanks to the public administration that promoted some telematic systems able to give information and services to citizens encouraging the bidirectional communication between promoters and users, and users themselves.
The setting of the experience: social and urban trends
In 2004, the City of Selargius, situated in the wide area of Cagliari, Sardinia, partecipates with its own project to a regional selections according to the national programme called “Contratti di Quartiere”, financed both with national and european funds and focused on urban recovery and regeneration of degradated districts either from physical, urban, environment and social point of view.
The programme requested the projects to distinguish themselves for a high degree of innovation and experimentation and also being the consequence of a participated and shared process using, if possible, NICT.
Selargius has been in the last thirty years an expansion area for all the metropolitan system of Cagliari, showing a strong demografic dynamism together an heterogeneous social composition bringing a violent and sudden change in the relationship between demand and offer both in quantity and quality in terms of service and facilities. These aspects created violent and unsettled development.
The programme requested the projects to distinguish themselves for a high degree of innovation and experimentation and also being the consequence of a participated and shared process using, if possible, NICT.
Selargius has been in the last thirty years an expansion area for all the metropolitan system of Cagliari, showing a strong demografic dynamism together an heterogeneous social composition bringing a violent and sudden change in the relationship between demand and offer both in quantity and quality in terms of service and facilities. These aspects created violent and unsettled development.
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| Fig. 1 – Population grouth by 1950 to 2004 (Source: Demographic Office, City of Selargius) |
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| Figure 2 Selargius administrative limits in the wide urban area |
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| Figure 3 Selargius administrative limits in the wide urban area |
The Setting of the Space of Interaction: The Participative Process
- lack of time and funds for developing the process;
- The inner complexity to create a partecipative process;
- difficulties related to the various scales of the design: urban, environmental, the building one and the social scale.
The experience was based on the assumption that the context had to fix the rules so that the starting activities were conducted through face to face interaction. During the process clearly appeared the following matrix where it is possible to individuate roles and goals:
- politicians: they pursued the maximum possible score in the regional rank to obtain funds and the consequent political prestige;
- public house inhabitants: their main aim was the chance to have new houses, they committed the government and engeneer abilities to get funds and also weren’t interested in other aspects like environmental, urbanistic or social issues;
- other inhabitants of the quarter: they were more interested in the restoration of the quarter in order to have better life condition, services and facilities; on the other hand they were affraid about the idea that public houses could be built near their houses;
- the planners: they shared the goals of the other actors involved, but they were also interested in making a project which could carry on urban and environmental issues together with “social equity” in a shared and interactive way, even through the use of NTIC (New Information & Comunication Technologies)
Even if the programm needed the formulation of innovative design through the involvement of different stakeholders the total evaluation score obtainable was very low, about 5 per cent. In spite of that, planners and politicians developed the process through participation, increasing the complexity and the risk to leave the work unsolved but having more guarantees in terms of acceptance of the design solutions by citizens and stakeholders in general.
As a first reflection it can be said that that decision allowed to gradually transform the experience in a continuous “collective learning” process, into which the participants were well disposed to collaborate in the comparison of demands and claims in order to formulate new ideas and projectual proposal.
Nevertheless, the lack of human resources to support and help citizens limited de facto the shared projectual action, and only few citizens, partners and qualified witnesses had been able to express completely itself with personal and voluntary initiative.
Partecipation procedures for the inhabitants
Quarter contracts had been already experienced in Italy with the first announcement in 2002 (http://www.contrattidiquartiere.net /casi-studio.htm). The relevant aspect of some previous experiences is related to the results due to the participation process led out in the so called quarter laboratories where the involved actors could suggest their ideas, observations, initiatives and design solutions both into workshops or individual working sessions.Planners framed the work so to recognize and emphasize the thick pattern of relashionships which structures the quarter that becomes an active subject for the shared construction of the projects.
In order to lead properly all the process it has been created a interdisciplinary workgroup, extremely heterogeneous and composed with different and complementary figures everyone according to his own role and responsabilities, to plan a process in which politicians, engeneers, sociologist, architects, qualified witnesses and citizens have been able to interact and compare themselves whithin a quarter laboratory.
The physical space that hosted the head office of the quarter laboratory belong to a private partner that was directly involved in the organization of the meetings.
Thanks to that, citizens have been able to face the Mayor with his staff in a direct way not mediated nor filtered by planners who only fixed the rules of the game making them to be respected.
It was made a quantitative evaluation about the penetration of Internet and NICT in Selargius population uncovering a not encouraging situation.
Against those result it was decided the same to start up a website that became the on line version of the quarter laboratory.
The idea was to use the website for an asynchronous interaction giving the opportunity to whom that didn’t can participate to the design workshops to join all the information required increasing the transparency of the process.
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| Figure 4 Actors and roles |
The Quarter Laboratory On-Line and Off-Line
As said before, a website was designed and constantly updated to “widen” and “empower” in terms of space and time the quarter laboratory.
Through the web site it has been possible to inform, communicate and design in a co-constructive way (Calvani et al., 1999).
A forum has been activated with a moderator for collecting planning proposal, but also for discussing about the potential impact of the project in the quarter. It is possible to view and download all the materials producted and also to send contributes simply by e-mail.
An important area of the web site is that dedicated to “what they say about us”. In fact, the WEB is a place in which time and space shrink and widen in a way which is difficult explain and imagine.
It is for sure, a place where it is possible a selfdescription of one’s own experience and aims. At this selfdescription corresponds, when it is able to get inside the space of the widerned interest, other rapresentations coming from reality.
In this section it was possible to find newspaper articles, reviews concerning the Statal Programme reported by other websites, letters sent to newspapers or to the Mayor.
Designing and production of the website has been articulated on three areas: methods and techniques for on line editing of information; ipertextual structure for different on line informative ambits and the parallelism with the off-line dimension; style and communicative and interactive effectiveness of the web pages.
Lack of time and funds, also in this phase of work, maked the difference so that was decided to use a simple static framework for developing the web site. Into this static framework was linked the institutional on-line forum where a new topic called “Contratto di Quartiere” was added.
That simple and chip choice permitted to open and make transparent the whole process, even if few people posted something related to that topic. But also today anybody can read all the documents and designs on the web site. (Actually it's not possible anymore to acces due to the switch-off of the website by the Municipality N.D.R)
This particular social condition carried out a feeling of distrust that suggested to organize and to develop a shared process through a cycle of meetings preceeded by a preliminary one with qualified witnesses (Dickens, 1990), identified thanks to direct unstructured interviews to the employes of the Administration, associations and potential partners of project considered as “privileged interlocutors“.
They tried to “read” the quarter, thinkink about not to project a recovery plan, but about the way each one of them could help in the start up of the process and ufter in the good management of the new spaces that the process itself was going to help to design.
In total, in about twenty days, were carried out five workshops, about ten inspection and quarter walks, about ten formal and informal meetings with the qualified witnesses and with the direct partners of the project.
That shortness of time gave the opportunity to push the process with a good rythm and a high level of attention and probably it was the reason for wich many citizens was stimulate in using the on-line quarter laboratory to have early news and up to date documents also overnight.
The workshops were useful not only for stimulate the interaction among the different actors but also a chance for the participant to contribute with personal opinions, critiques and comments.
The in-presence meetings were conducted using a series of cartographic, photographic rappresentations and wall charts (Caschili, Cossu, 2000, 2001) in order to gather projectual ideas and also, critics and suggestions so that the projectual brainstorms have been managed in a visual form to reveal the numerous original ideas in every single dimension of the project.
Next meetings were opened with the “bringing back“ of the work done in order to verify the conformity of the rielaborated materials to the needs and ideas of the previous meeting.
Since the first meeting it was clear that rappresentation methods had to be more simple and fast. This suggested to use traditional both paper plans and more friendly and fast modifiable rappresentations made and showed by a computer linked to a video projector.
The possibility to see large pictures on the wall and to manipulate and draw on paper materials in a total informal way facilitated the creation process for citizens, politicians and planners. This sort of team building put in light the multiple role of the planners switching by technician, facilitator, and trainer.
But the most important role was that of designer both of physical and relational space. All the materials produced during the presence meetings have been reported every day on the quarter laboratory web site directly linked to the istitutional Selargius website.
All the process was characterized by conflictual situations related to the different interests and the heterogeneity of the participants involved.
That aspect put in light the need to readjust gradually the role of the planner in order to answer to a plurality of organized interests and to encourage decisional processes developed into a complex communication network.
Probably the high exposition of the planners in those multiple roles, even if one per time, was the origin of some objections about participation modalities and the absence of singolar figures like pure facilitators or sociologists during the workshops but actually present in the design of the whole process.
The process itself was developed as a mix between differents techniques and the inner difficulties of the context gave the opportunity to hybridize and shape them to the needs.
We report below a scheme of the techniques that planners used:
Now it is at the final draft step.
The described experience shows since the beginning of the work the necessity to search, study and try new effective methods, techniques and instruments so to act such complex context.
The claim to plan and design the physical space in a shared way with stakeholders carried out the necessity to design even the space of interaction and communication.
But even if the local context belongs to an urban area of rather 500.000 inhabitants, it has been necessary to have to do with a particular form of digital divide.
For such reason the off-line dimension became much sgnificant than the on-line one. Even in a favourable situation where ethic intentionality of planner meets the political will of the Administration to construct new ways of communication and participation, the use of NICT was practically irrelevant in the definition of the project in terms of equity and sustainability compared to the use of face to face techniques.
The planner didn’t play the traditional role of bearer of the technical knowledge but he was called to manage cognitive, cooperative, plural and complex spaces, in the on-line and off-line dimension putting in light the argumentative dimension of communication techniques.
The results allow us to reflect not only about interaction techniques and their effectiveness but also the modalities and original combination that the planner found himself experimenting in his edge position between public administration and the large groups of stakeholders involved in the design of the public space.
The theoretical approach used was based on concepts of cooperation, partecipation and interaction as equity planning (Krumholtz, Forester, 1990), progressive planning (Forester, 1999), and collaborative planning (Healey, 2003). These mentioned approaches promote a planning activity strictly influenced by the local context in which they work.
In this context it is the relationship with the ihnabitants and the continuous interaction among the different actors involved that characterize the project as processual action and the planner is called to adapt its own “tool box” to the complexity and plurality of interests at stake.
These experiences force to reflect on planner’s role: finding itself acting with ever new and original methods, the planner has also to be able to explore useful methods for the management and solution of conflict so to make coherent clashing aims and interests (Shoen, 1983).
Therefore, planner’s aim is to support and encourage a decisional shared and partecipated process, and to develop it within a communication and continuous dealing network (Innes, 1995,1996), tipical of complex organizations.
In the operative context to which the paper refers, the planners constantly reinterpreted their own role, fluctuating between physical space designer and knowledge engineer, strategically communicating, carrying out and managing the internal and external governance of the process.
A figure who constantly faced with the awareness that, according with Forester (1998), “you cannot choose to be a technician or a politician” by deciding how much to act in a direct or indirect way, to whom serve and to whom exclude exerting your own “political” influence to encourage the project as “a research of alternatives in a space of solutions”; on the other side, that it's the context that fixes the interaction rules (Watzlavick et al., 1967): these rules have been interpreted by setting communicative and planning techniques (Sanhoff, 1999).
Through the intentional ethic of the planner it was possibile to encourage processes with strong interactive and communicative features “where participants create and share information in order to get a mutual comprehention” (Rogers, Kinkaid, 1981), and where design and planning concern itself no longer and “not only as practice that gives shape, but also as experience of mutual making sense through practical conversations” (Forester, 1998).
That mutual "making of sense" required a continuous re-definition of problems and finding out methods to be used to face them.
It has been necessary a constant re-interpretation and re-definition of the context, whishes and aims of the different involved actors, so that practice problems, interactive and communicative techniques and the use of new technologies have been constantly re-defined and shaped on demand during the work.
It is possible to underline both some strenght points and critical points related to the participation process and the planner’s role:
Despite the successful situation:
At the most, those elements suggest an internal review about the Planner’s role, even more efforted managing processes and communication technologies and not only focused in a mediation role among Public Administration intended as the depository of “administrative facts” (Morbelli, 1997), citizens and partners of the project, but also as a subject that had to know and propose techniques and shared work modalities oriented to equity.
The technical skills of planners that in Italy generally came from architecture or engeneering schools, are a foundamental base without which ideas neither can become real designs for the physical space, nor can face with real problems to become actual. But the Planner remains more often only a physical space designer without enlarging the process to the off-line or on-line participation. So, on one hand training and on the other hand the context becomes very important.
Training has to be couppled with human attributes that are very important in comunicative and interactive processes design where it is essential not only the technical and scientific profile but also the human one. Therefore it is possible to find that indefinable dimension that makes every single esperience of participation in planning processes like no other and which cause the success or unsuccess of many experiences similar to the one here explained.
The context appears like a fragmented and confusing social-space-temporal structure into which the planner assumed a role very similar to the bricoleur ready to assume its own risks related to the hybridization of the techniques and to the innovation of the approacches (Rizzi, 2004, 2005, 2006).
Nowadays centers and suburbs not linked by logical chains of interaction that define relationships from the micro to the macro dimension set the design of the territory in all its undercurrents. Thus, the planner in condition to intercept the various contradictions of the building processes (Branzi, 2006) put in light the potential that each layer and dimensional category can offer respect the whole.
REFERENCES
a) Books and Books chapters
b) Journal papers
c) Papers presented to conferences
Through the web site it has been possible to inform, communicate and design in a co-constructive way (Calvani et al., 1999).
A forum has been activated with a moderator for collecting planning proposal, but also for discussing about the potential impact of the project in the quarter. It is possible to view and download all the materials producted and also to send contributes simply by e-mail.
An important area of the web site is that dedicated to “what they say about us”. In fact, the WEB is a place in which time and space shrink and widen in a way which is difficult explain and imagine.
It is for sure, a place where it is possible a selfdescription of one’s own experience and aims. At this selfdescription corresponds, when it is able to get inside the space of the widerned interest, other rapresentations coming from reality.
In this section it was possible to find newspaper articles, reviews concerning the Statal Programme reported by other websites, letters sent to newspapers or to the Mayor.
Designing and production of the website has been articulated on three areas: methods and techniques for on line editing of information; ipertextual structure for different on line informative ambits and the parallelism with the off-line dimension; style and communicative and interactive effectiveness of the web pages.
Lack of time and funds, also in this phase of work, maked the difference so that was decided to use a simple static framework for developing the web site. Into this static framework was linked the institutional on-line forum where a new topic called “Contratto di Quartiere” was added.
That simple and chip choice permitted to open and make transparent the whole process, even if few people posted something related to that topic. But also today anybody can read all the documents and designs on the web site. (Actually it's not possible anymore to acces due to the switch-off of the website by the Municipality N.D.R)
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| Figure 5 Home page of the Quarter Laboratory web site (web.tiscali.it/tecla1/cq2selargius) |
Face to Face Meetings: Instruments and Working Modalities
Even if the quarter didn’t have homogeneous characteristics, it was deeply characterized by unwealthy target.This particular social condition carried out a feeling of distrust that suggested to organize and to develop a shared process through a cycle of meetings preceeded by a preliminary one with qualified witnesses (Dickens, 1990), identified thanks to direct unstructured interviews to the employes of the Administration, associations and potential partners of project considered as “privileged interlocutors“.
They tried to “read” the quarter, thinkink about not to project a recovery plan, but about the way each one of them could help in the start up of the process and ufter in the good management of the new spaces that the process itself was going to help to design.
In total, in about twenty days, were carried out five workshops, about ten inspection and quarter walks, about ten formal and informal meetings with the qualified witnesses and with the direct partners of the project.
That shortness of time gave the opportunity to push the process with a good rythm and a high level of attention and probably it was the reason for wich many citizens was stimulate in using the on-line quarter laboratory to have early news and up to date documents also overnight.
The workshops were useful not only for stimulate the interaction among the different actors but also a chance for the participant to contribute with personal opinions, critiques and comments.
The in-presence meetings were conducted using a series of cartographic, photographic rappresentations and wall charts (Caschili, Cossu, 2000, 2001) in order to gather projectual ideas and also, critics and suggestions so that the projectual brainstorms have been managed in a visual form to reveal the numerous original ideas in every single dimension of the project.
Next meetings were opened with the “bringing back“ of the work done in order to verify the conformity of the rielaborated materials to the needs and ideas of the previous meeting.
Since the first meeting it was clear that rappresentation methods had to be more simple and fast. This suggested to use traditional both paper plans and more friendly and fast modifiable rappresentations made and showed by a computer linked to a video projector.
The possibility to see large pictures on the wall and to manipulate and draw on paper materials in a total informal way facilitated the creation process for citizens, politicians and planners. This sort of team building put in light the multiple role of the planners switching by technician, facilitator, and trainer.
But the most important role was that of designer both of physical and relational space. All the materials produced during the presence meetings have been reported every day on the quarter laboratory web site directly linked to the istitutional Selargius website.
All the process was characterized by conflictual situations related to the different interests and the heterogeneity of the participants involved.
That aspect put in light the need to readjust gradually the role of the planner in order to answer to a plurality of organized interests and to encourage decisional processes developed into a complex communication network.
Probably the high exposition of the planners in those multiple roles, even if one per time, was the origin of some objections about participation modalities and the absence of singolar figures like pure facilitators or sociologists during the workshops but actually present in the design of the whole process.
The process itself was developed as a mix between differents techniques and the inner difficulties of the context gave the opportunity to hybridize and shape them to the needs.
We report below a scheme of the techniques that planners used:
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| Figure 6 Scheme of the techniques used |
Conclusions and Open Issues
The recovery programme obtained the highest score in the rank and five million euros grant.Now it is at the final draft step.
The described experience shows since the beginning of the work the necessity to search, study and try new effective methods, techniques and instruments so to act such complex context.
The claim to plan and design the physical space in a shared way with stakeholders carried out the necessity to design even the space of interaction and communication.
But even if the local context belongs to an urban area of rather 500.000 inhabitants, it has been necessary to have to do with a particular form of digital divide.
For such reason the off-line dimension became much sgnificant than the on-line one. Even in a favourable situation where ethic intentionality of planner meets the political will of the Administration to construct new ways of communication and participation, the use of NICT was practically irrelevant in the definition of the project in terms of equity and sustainability compared to the use of face to face techniques.
The planner didn’t play the traditional role of bearer of the technical knowledge but he was called to manage cognitive, cooperative, plural and complex spaces, in the on-line and off-line dimension putting in light the argumentative dimension of communication techniques.
The results allow us to reflect not only about interaction techniques and their effectiveness but also the modalities and original combination that the planner found himself experimenting in his edge position between public administration and the large groups of stakeholders involved in the design of the public space.
The theoretical approach used was based on concepts of cooperation, partecipation and interaction as equity planning (Krumholtz, Forester, 1990), progressive planning (Forester, 1999), and collaborative planning (Healey, 2003). These mentioned approaches promote a planning activity strictly influenced by the local context in which they work.
In this context it is the relationship with the ihnabitants and the continuous interaction among the different actors involved that characterize the project as processual action and the planner is called to adapt its own “tool box” to the complexity and plurality of interests at stake.
These experiences force to reflect on planner’s role: finding itself acting with ever new and original methods, the planner has also to be able to explore useful methods for the management and solution of conflict so to make coherent clashing aims and interests (Shoen, 1983).
Therefore, planner’s aim is to support and encourage a decisional shared and partecipated process, and to develop it within a communication and continuous dealing network (Innes, 1995,1996), tipical of complex organizations.
In the operative context to which the paper refers, the planners constantly reinterpreted their own role, fluctuating between physical space designer and knowledge engineer, strategically communicating, carrying out and managing the internal and external governance of the process.
A figure who constantly faced with the awareness that, according with Forester (1998), “you cannot choose to be a technician or a politician” by deciding how much to act in a direct or indirect way, to whom serve and to whom exclude exerting your own “political” influence to encourage the project as “a research of alternatives in a space of solutions”; on the other side, that it's the context that fixes the interaction rules (Watzlavick et al., 1967): these rules have been interpreted by setting communicative and planning techniques (Sanhoff, 1999).
Through the intentional ethic of the planner it was possibile to encourage processes with strong interactive and communicative features “where participants create and share information in order to get a mutual comprehention” (Rogers, Kinkaid, 1981), and where design and planning concern itself no longer and “not only as practice that gives shape, but also as experience of mutual making sense through practical conversations” (Forester, 1998).
That mutual "making of sense" required a continuous re-definition of problems and finding out methods to be used to face them.
It has been necessary a constant re-interpretation and re-definition of the context, whishes and aims of the different involved actors, so that practice problems, interactive and communicative techniques and the use of new technologies have been constantly re-defined and shaped on demand during the work.
It is possible to underline both some strenght points and critical points related to the participation process and the planner’s role:
- The Administration goals were achieved: maximum ranking and funds achivieble; unanimity in the City Council and political prestige.
- Citizens goals were achived: localizaton and tipology of the apartaments, improvement in the quality of life for the neighbourhood.
- Planners goals were achieved too: satisfaction for the stakeholders and actors involved in the process, environmental orientation of the design, comunicative and interactive characterization of the process.
Despite the successful situation:
- it was experienced a lack of time, funds and human resources, exactly as most italian experiences. This lead to think that feature as a constituent feature of this kind of processes.
- the experience was led in 2004 within a region that belongs to one of the eight most industrialized and rich nations in the world. Even if the local context has been well inclined towards a communicative and interactive approach, participation in the on-line dimension through the web site has not been so important compared with the results of the off-line one.
At the most, those elements suggest an internal review about the Planner’s role, even more efforted managing processes and communication technologies and not only focused in a mediation role among Public Administration intended as the depository of “administrative facts” (Morbelli, 1997), citizens and partners of the project, but also as a subject that had to know and propose techniques and shared work modalities oriented to equity.
The technical skills of planners that in Italy generally came from architecture or engeneering schools, are a foundamental base without which ideas neither can become real designs for the physical space, nor can face with real problems to become actual. But the Planner remains more often only a physical space designer without enlarging the process to the off-line or on-line participation. So, on one hand training and on the other hand the context becomes very important.
Training has to be couppled with human attributes that are very important in comunicative and interactive processes design where it is essential not only the technical and scientific profile but also the human one. Therefore it is possible to find that indefinable dimension that makes every single esperience of participation in planning processes like no other and which cause the success or unsuccess of many experiences similar to the one here explained.
The context appears like a fragmented and confusing social-space-temporal structure into which the planner assumed a role very similar to the bricoleur ready to assume its own risks related to the hybridization of the techniques and to the innovation of the approacches (Rizzi, 2004, 2005, 2006).
Nowadays centers and suburbs not linked by logical chains of interaction that define relationships from the micro to the macro dimension set the design of the territory in all its undercurrents. Thus, the planner in condition to intercept the various contradictions of the building processes (Branzi, 2006) put in light the potential that each layer and dimensional category can offer respect the whole.
REFERENCES
a) Books and Books chapters
- Branzi, A. (2006), Modernità debole e diffusa, Skira Editore, Milano
- Calvani, A. Rotta, M. (1999), Comunicazione e apprendimento in Internet, Erickson, Trento
- Dickens, P. (1990), Urban Sociology. Society, Locality and Human Nature, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf
- Forester, J. (1999), The Deliberative Practitioner. Encouraging Participatory Planning Process, MIT Press, Cambridge – Massachussetts;
- Friedman, J. (1992), Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development, Blackwell, Cambridge
- Healey, P. (1997), Collaborative Planning. Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies, Macmillan, London
- Krumholtz, N. Forester, J. (1990), Making Equity Planning work: Leadership in the public Sector, Temple University Press, Philadelphia
- Krumholz, N., Clavel, P. (1994), Reinventing Cities,Temple University Press, Philadelphia
- Morbelli, G. (1997), Città e Piani d’Europa, Dedalo, Bari
- Rizzi, P. (2006), “Giochi di città e città in gioco”, in Indovina F. (ed), Il nuovo lessico urbano, FrancoAngeli, Milano
- Rogers, E.M. Kinkaid D.L. (1981), Communication Networks: Toward a Paradigm for Research, Free Press, New York
- Watzlawick, P. et al. (1967), Pragmatics of Human Communication, W.W Norton & Company.
b) Journal papers
- Innes, J. E. (1996), “Planning Through Consensus Building: A New View of the Comprehensive Planning Ideal”, Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol.62 No. 4.
- Innes, J. E. (1995), “Planning Theory's Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice”, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol.14 No. 3
- Schuler, D. (1994), Community networks, Building a New Participatory Medium, Comm. of the ACM, vol. 37, n.1,
c) Papers presented to conferences
- Biolghini, D, Cengarle, M. (1999), Planning with citizens the civic network: the IMAGINE project in Casale Monferrato, in Rizzi P. (ed), CUPUM ’99 Proceedings, Venice
- Caschili, L., Cossu, R. (2001), “On-line and off-line interactive process for planning: an application in a marginal urban area”, Concilio, G., Monno, V. (eds), INPUT 2001 Proceedings, Bari
- Rizzi, P. (2005), “Eat the Cabbage, Kill the Wolf. When a game becomes a useful tool for the simulation of communication, information and decision making process”. Isaga 2005 Conference Proceedings, Atlanta
- Rizzi, P. (2004), “The use of software focused on the analysis and simulation of complex systems to plan and create Gaming Simulations”, Kriz, W.C., Eberle, T. (eds), Isaga 2004 Conference Proceedings
d) Others materials
- European Commission (2001), White Paper on European Governance, http://europa.eu/eur-lex/en/com/cnc/2001/com2001_0428en01.pdf
- Rheingold, H. (1995), Virtual Community and Civic Life in Amsterdam, http://www.well.com/www/hlr/howard.html
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