Working with the community

Although the legal framework in Serbia is nominally determined for public participation in decision-making and legal and planning documents, in practice this participation is reduced to informing i consulting, which are the lowest levels of participation. Additionally, existing forms of participation are rarely implemented transparently and consistently. As a consequence of such behavior of institutions, they distance themselves from the needs of the public, which then loses confidence in institutional processes. In addition, the expert community to a large extent still does not advocate full public participation, even though it is a political issue par excellence, the one around which we all need to negotiate together. In such a context, our collective's many years of experience in trying to change this situation, both through analysis and proposing different, more participatory policies, and through working with citizens and empowering them, has shown that changes are undoubtedly possible.

Through Crisis headquarters for urban planning our work is focused on direct cooperation with local self-organized groups of citizens, who want to oppose a specific spatial intervention that is not in the interest of their community. Our support is mainly aimed at empowering them, through workshops and trainings, providing relevant knowledge and tools in the field of planning, so that their needs are more clearly articulated and supported by stronger (often only in technical terms) argumentation. Many of the insights we ourselves gained from all these local struggles directly informed the various ones tools for strengthening citizen participation in urban planning which we have developed for all existing and future self-organized citizens. During the last 5 years, we have cooperated with more than 60 self-organized local groups of citizens throughout Serbia, with more than 10 individuals/activists, 6 investigative journalists, and we have done more than 30 independent analyzes of laws, plans and projects around which we mobilized the general public in in order to protect the public interest. All these partnerships with civic groups only confirmed our initial belief that citizens really have the competence and capacity for full participation in the creation of planning solutions for their cities, it is only necessary that they have access to all the necessary information and that they know the decision-making process. 

Bearing that in mind, apart from pointing out the necessity of improving the existing participation processes, we also wanted to design and promote new models of citizen involvement which will qualitatively improve participation and raise it to higher levels cooperation i partnerships institutions and citizens. In this, we were inspired by practice deliberative democracy as a decision-making approach that has been increasingly used in recent years within and outside the institutional framework in many European countries, as well as the concrete experience of our team's participation in civil assemblies organized by the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade and Valjevo. 

Although the model of civil assemblies is applicable to a whole range of topics, we wanted to apply and adapt this model to the areas in which we already operate, and to begin with in the area of ​​urban planning, thus building on our many years of work with citizens and local communities. In an attempt to explore the potential and benefits of this model ourselves, we organized a total of four in 2021 and 2022 mini civil assemblies on the topic of specific urban plans. Between 35 and 40 citizens from the territory for which the plan is being prepared participated in each of these assemblies, together with experts from the fields of urban and spatial planning, traffic, communal infrastructure, green infrastructure, etc. designed spatial solutions for the problems they feel every day in their neighborhoods. Representatives of institutions and decision-makers were supposed to attend these assemblies, but unfortunately they did not respond to the invitations. 

In contrast to the mostly one-way communication with citizens in the existing system, where the diversity of participants is not ensured, nor do the participants have all the information, and through which the views and needs of citizens are collected, and then most often they are not respected, the format of the citizens' assembly offers a completely different model co-decision making. They represent an attempt to provide a safe space for equal discussion between different actors who use, plan and manage a territory (residents of a part of the city, urban planners, experts, local civic initiatives, decision-makers, etc.). Their experiences and knowledge produce different insights, sometimes conflicting, in relation to a certain space, and through moderated discussions in small groups and plenary formats within the civic assembly, it is intended that such insights are first of all clearly clarified, argued, and then tried to reconcile with the aspiration to reach a consensus about the solution that is actually in common interest.