Participation in the City: How Urban Participatory Innovations are Reshaping Democracy, Governance and Trust

This award will fund a research project to study democratic innovations taking place in urban areas. Cities have been a key source of myriad urban participatory innovations (UPIs) that create new practices and institutions that allow citizens to inform and reshape democracy. Urban participatory innovations include both grassroots attempts to use physical and digital spaces to build trust and reshape democracy, as well as institutional reforms such as open government and participatory design of institutions even as they are also sites of political conflict and deep inequalities.

This project (PAR-CITY) will examine how and why cities are responding to the democratic challenges by better understanding urban participatory institutions in seven cities. It builds on existing research and incorporates new empirical work using a variety of research methods, including qualitative and quantitative analyses. The research will shift disciplinary landscapes by centering the role of cities and UPIs in studies of democracy, governance, and trust (DGT), drawing new relations between disciplines and geographical contexts, producing a co-authored book, several journal articles and a digital platform.

An interdisciplinary set of 25 researchers working in three work streams will undertake a relational comparison of the seven cities to address three central research questions: 1) How are urban participatory innovations (UPIs) reshaping power, authority, and conflict? 2) How do UPIs confront marginalization and inequalities? And 3) How do concepts, understandings, and practices of UPIs relate across geographical differences?

By exploring these questions, the team will achieve several goals, such as establishing the empirical significance of cities for responding to the global challenges of democracy, governance and trust. PAR-CITY examines how UPIs enhance democratic processes, improve governance and rebuild trust in cities. PAR-CITY will provide comparative and interdisciplinary data that help understand the significance of cities to the central themes of this T-AP call, beyond very localized and often outdated studies.

PAR-CITY will also examine the role of digital media, tools and technologies in democracy, governance and trust in large cities. In particular PAR-CITY will examine UPIs through smart cities, social media, open government and the use of digital technology in participatory governance. Digital innovations have the potential to break down distance between citizens and institutions yet can also present negative externalities that exacerbate inequality, marginalization and conflict. PAR-CITY will also advance concepts, models and theories of DGT through the central notion of UPI.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.