Dit essay is onderdeel van een reeks van artikelen over ‘wonen als collectieve en culturele opgave’, waarmee CAST nieuwe perspectieven en een gedeelde verantwoordelijkheid in de aanpak van de wooncrisis verkent.

We vroegen Adeola Enigbokan, kunstenaar, stedenbouwkundige en omgevingspsycholoog om het tweede artikel in deze serie te schrijven, en stelden haar de volgende vraag: "Wat is er nodig om een inclusieve samenleving te ontwikkelen, bouwen en huisvesten - niet alleen voor, maar ook met de samenleving zelf? Hoe creëer je meerstemmigheid, een echt inclusief proces? Hoe zorg je ervoor dat het perspectief van de gebruikers aanwezig is in ontwerp- en stedenbouwprocessen? En wie draagt hiervoor de verantwoordelijkheid?" Met het oog op de nieuwe Omgevingswet, die sinds januari 2024 van kracht is en overheden verplicht om participatiebeleid op te stellen, zijn deze vragen urgenter dan ooit.

Dear CAST,

Thank you for your great question, and for your interest in my response. As you know, I have been concerned with the questions of how to build and house and inclusive society for a large part of my career. I feel it is best to answer your question with, as you suggested, a few examples from visual art and architecture. 

The Master’s Plan

In 2011 and 2012 I lived in Moscow. I worked as a design researcher at the Strelka Institute, with a partner of the Dutch firm OMA, on a proposal for a new masterplan for the city. The current leadership of the city, which included the mayor and the Kremlin, had the idea to double the size and economic orientation of the city by demolishing existing housing at the peripheries to build a large center of technology and commerce. This new city-within-the-city would potentially render millions of Muscovites homeless and there was no plan to accommodate the displaced people. I chose to spend my time on the project in one of the housing developments at the periphery, which was in danger of demolition. I wished to understand how this place, home to thousands of people, had been designed and built, and how people who had lived there all of their lives experienced it.

I spent about six months visiting this microrayon and, with the help of friends who lived there, I came to understand the layers of meaning within this space, beyond simply being the site of a housing development that mirrored many typical Soviet housing blocks. What made the place home—a place for which some people were willing to fight to preserve—was that the people I met felt that they had built it themselves. They had constructed their lives in this place, given it meaning and value (many had re-designed their home interiors) and the prospect of losing their small place in the city was unbearable.

Back in the studio with the OMA partners, I found that it was very difficult to communicate the details of my research. The architects I was working with were unwilling to connect the messy realities of people’s everyday lives to the pristine renderings that they were making of the master plans for the future city. The architects were developing was a global language of spatial design, by traveling from Rotterdam to Moscow, Beijing, and other cities around the world. I noticed that the smooth global language of spatial design did not seem to embrace or include the complex idioms of local living and belonging. This experience inspired my doctoral dissertation, and the trajectory of my work for the next decade. I was, and still am, committed to helping architects understand messy realities. This approach is core to my writing and my teaching. It is from this perspective that I respond to your question about how to build an inclusive city in the Netherlands.

"I noticed that the smooth global language of spatial design did not seem to embrace or include the complex idioms of local living and belonging. This experience inspired my doctoral dissertation, and the trajectory of my work for the next decade. I was, and still am, committed to helping architects understand messy realities."

A New Law

In January 2024, a new Environment and Planning law went into effect in the Netherlands, which mandates that each province, municipality and local water board develop its own substantive policy for public participation. By decentralizing participation policy, the law allows local and regional governments to set the terms for citizen participation; to determine which groups are underrepresented, and the way these groups could be accounted for in the process; and even to set the extent to which public participation would be able to affect the design and implementation of new environmental plans. This new decentralized approach to participation extends beyond the European Netherlands into the Caribbean Netherlands, whose citizens only received the right to vote in Dutch general elections for the first time in 2012. In Bonaire, Sint-Eustatius and Saba the proposed Wet Versterking participatie op decentral niveau (Strengthening participation at a decentralized level Act) intends to “enshrine the [citizen’s] right to challenge” as part of the participation process: “With the right to challenge, residents can challenge their government to take over the execution of certain tasks, such as the management or maintenance of a park or community center.” [1] This new mandate for participation is especially important, because it speaks to the history of Dutch planning practices, especially in its colonies, in which design ideas were spread from the top-down, by “modernist” fiat, and in which the ability to challenge these ideas, or even to continue living in the local traditional ways, were often erased. To be able to design the housing and systems in which one lives, is a key aspect of autonomy and self-determination for a people. This is the true meaning of an “inclusive society.”

One way to understand this new mandate is to see it not only as a decentralization of a bureaucratic planning process, but also as a great expansion of Dutch concepts of citizenship. Through meaningful public participation in shaping the environmental design and planning of the future of the Netherlands and all of its global territories, a more inclusive notion of what it means to be a Dutch citizen could emerge. We tend to think of citizenship as a fixed category, but it is not. Citizenship is a category which opens and closes along with changes in government, resources, population and national sentiment. When there are struggles over space or resources, questions immediately arise over who is a citizen or not, and what our duties and obligations are to “outsiders.” Our ability to keep the category of citizenship open and expansive is almost certainly a sign of peace and prosperity in the city. From tending to a public garden, joining a local community center, engaging in public advocacy or activism, or even participating in the planning of a new housing development, everyday practices and processes can both test and expand the limits of citizenship and belonging in a city. Planners and designers, therefore, have a role to play in securing the peace: if our ideas and designs can contribute to keeping the category of citizenship open and expanding, we will have done a great service to the city. Looked at in this way, designing an inclusive participation process can be considered as important as designing a new park, housing development, or shopping center.

It is important for architects, and all involved in town planning to recognize the importance of this new law. It provides the possibility for more levels of participation in Dutch town planning than ever seen before. In particular, it could be opening a new area of involvement in the design process, from the concept-design level, where there is a free-for-all in expertise, and where architectural and planning education is often lacking in this regard: creative and meaningful ways of engaging people in design processes in such a way that results in improved housing and public spaces for all.

“Designing participation is as important as designing a park, housing development or shopping center.”

Living Statistics

For architects, designers, civil servants, politicians and cultural workers who are professionally engaged in imagining the future of urban environments, participation can no longer be just about the design outcomes, or whether or not our specific building vision is realized. Rather, we must consider how designing participation is crucial to shaping the mindset of the people who will occupy these future spaces, especially their sense of ownership, belonging and engagement in the life of the future city. Our ability to expand and experiment with processes of participation and citizenship must become a part of the way we produce and evaluate good design.

There is a great deal of work to be done to develop new participation models, tailored to the needs of each locality and design project. This means not only expanding the minds of the professionals who lead participation processes, but also communicating the cultural opportunity that is available to the public to redefine what participation itself could mean. In other words, we must accept that architects are no longer the only people, or even the most important people, making design decisions in a given project. Creating spaces in which that multi-vocal conversation can happen productively, and then actively facilitating that conversation, is the work of cultural practitioners and of any creative and publicly-oriented professionals who are concerned about the future of the city, including architects. This important facilitation process could, and probably should, be happening even when there is not a current planning process ongoing.

Currently, mainstream participatory design models focus on traditional public information meetings (e.g. residents evenings) usually organized by local municipalities and developers and the statistical models created by companies such as Citisens. In the advice provided to leaders of new planning projects by the Brabant regional authority, Citisens is mentioned as a major source of information related to public opinion of public space and other relevant matters. For example, When municipalities around the Netherlands wish to design a new housing development, or find out public attitudes about the opening of a new center to accommodate Ukrainian refugees, Citisens provides the market research and polling and tests the ideas. According to the company’s website, Citisens focuses on issues of “area development, energy transition and democratic renewal.” [2] The Citisens Method relies on the “responses of a group of about 75,000 Dutch people who regularly give their opinion on social issues.” With the decentralization of participation processes, and increasing responsibility of each municipality to produce its own data-driven evidence of public participation in each major design project, reliance on the information provided by Citisens will likely become more and more valuable in design processes. The work of these companies clearly indicates that meaningful public participation in design processes can be connected to having deeper experiences of citizenship. What is the role of art, design, architecture and cultural workers in facilitating these more robust experiences?

An example of cultural workers opening space for re-thinking participatory design can be seen in the work of the Brabant-based artist collective YAFF. Working in cities such as Tilburg and Boxtel, the collective conceives and implements social art and design interventions in public spaces. In the project Leven de Statistiek, YAFF begins from the premise that the statistical models by which we determine the reality around us—the economy, the population demographics, the available natural resources, the rate of environmental pollution—are themselves “simplified ideologies,” which are biased by our pre-existing worldviews and perspectives. Prior to the local elections in Boxtel, YAFF presented a “living graph” of the municipal budget, making clear that 85% of the funds had already been allocated by the government, leaving only 15% “in play,” for public participatory decision-making. This living graph, a color-coded, accessible and three-dimensional infographic, was made of pieces of colored paper attached to a large display board with wheat paste and displayed in a ground-floor window facing the public street. Through conversations with Boxtel residents, and after attending various public information meetings, YAFF modeled a process of participatory budgeting: “Based on conversations with citizens we changed the graph and this ‘Living Statistic’ depicted the consequences of both cutting back and wanting to invest more in certain areas. Thus, assumptions were questioned and [budgetary] choices were put in a different perspective.” [3] This approach to participation does not simply represent the residents as an aggregate opinion, as in a survey, or inform residents of new municipal developments, as in an information evening, but rather uses creative tools to engage people at a deeper level of questioning the premises of how and why their local municipal budget is designed in this way. This kind of engagement, I would argue, creates the awareness and experience of (self-)government that leads to more active citizenship and resident involvement in future public design processes.

Deep Listening

A few years ago, I was asked by an Amsterdam-based cultural organization to help with a difficult problem: how to encourage the residents of a local social housing estate to attend the cultural events they were holding at their gallery? Because they received public funding, the organization had a mandate to participate with the local community and they felt the best way to do this would be to have the community come into their pre-existing space. My first response was to change the question into “what public cultural life already exists in this community, and how can the cultural organization best participate in, contribute to, and enhance that existing public life?” This simple change allowed us to develop a process that depended on listening to residents, and not mainly upon implementing the client’s original concept. Working on-site in the housing estate with a team of twenty-one researchers over eight weeks, and engaging with local residents of different ages, ethnicities, histories, backgrounds, professions and interests, we produced a proposal for the organization that we were able to present to the local municipality. The proposal was adopted by our client and the eventual outcome was a new cultural center with programming tailored to the needs and interests of the local community, designed in an under-used space on the social housing estate, which our research had identified. Instead of bringing the people to the gallery, the gallery came to the people.

To help local governments with the daunting task of defining their own participation policies, the national government provides a “participation ladder,” as a conceptual framework, which has been adapted at the regional and local levels. The participation ladder included in the Brabant region’s participation policy is presented as an illustration of a ladder with five rungs, all of which feature a male figure wearing white shirt, dark tie and black trousers. This figure appears to be the “professional person” responsible for leading the process from conception to implementation. The rungs of the ladder describe ten stages beginning with Inform, Comprehend, Consult, and ending with Ownership, Co-decision and Responsibility. Each of these stages outlines a role for the citizen-participant that begins passively, and gets more active the further up the ladder that the process goes. What remains unclear is how exactly the progress from one stage to another is actually managed, with each stage requiring increasingly complex forms of engagement, coordination and participation.

"Deep listening addresses an important reason why people participate in public processes: to be heard, and to be acknowledged. Deep listening often means deep participation."

The more complex the participation process, the more important communication becomes. When engaging multiple participants or stakeholders, with varying levels of knowledge, expertise, availability and interest, communication must move beyond the level of providing information to the public, and extend into the ability to receive feedback and entertain responses which may be difficult to hear or to implement practically. To go from the lower rungs of the “participation ladder,” where information primarily moves in one direction (as in formal public meetings), or is easily extracted and turned into actionable data points (via surveys and questionnaires) towards higher levels of multi-directional collaboration, space must be made for richer forms of communication to occur. One way that I have found to enhance communication is through deep listening. Deep listening aims at understanding varying and contrary perspectives. Deep listening orients the listener not only to hear the words that are being said, but to actually take in the emotions and other intangible factors motivating the speaker, in order to be able to truly address the differences, challenges, and potential conflicts that arise in complex collaborative processes. Deep listening addresses an important reason why people participate in public processes: to be heard, and to be acknowledged. Deep listening often means deep participation. Right now, there is an emerging landscape of participatory design created by this new law, where participation can take many, or any, forms, as long as they match conceptually with the purpose and direction of the design. It seems to me that architects and firms in the Netherlands that can now take on more holistic planning processes, which include solid participation frameworks, will be able to win the work, provide the best service to clients while developing more inclusive social infrastructures.

[1] “Getting started with participation Policy” – Environmental Act Implementation Website https://iplo.nl/regelgeving/omgevingswet/participatie/participatiebeleid/
[2] See Citisens website for descriptions of the topics, methods and a sampling of previous cases https://www.citisens.nl/
[3] YAFF – Leven de Statistiek #1 https://yaff.nl/projecten/leven-de-statistiek-1/

Adeola Enigbokan is kunstenaar, stedenbouwkundige en omgevingspsycholoog. Momenteel doceert ze Social Design aan de Design Academy Eindhoven. Eerder doceerde ze architectuur aan de Rietveld Academie Amsterdam en Science and Technology Studies aan New York University. Ze heeft een PhD in psychologie van de City University of New Yor en een BA in antropologie van Colombia University.

Redactie: CAST (Alexandra Sonnemans, Sophie Stravens, Eva Hoonhout)