Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann | Spatial Development and Urban Policy

Participatory Urban Governance

The realization of large urban infrastructure projects is necessary to achieve long-term planning goals such as sustainable cities, just cities or smart cities. Yet, these large urban infrastructure projects are more and more contested by city residents (for example Amazon HQ2 in New York, Toronto Sidewalk Labs, or Europaallee in Zürich). The resistance of city residents is often labelled as NIMBYism (not in my backyard) or resistance against changes in a spatially closely built environment triggered by a fear of potential negative externalities. However, the literature on urban participatory governance suspects that there is more to this resistance than mere NIMBYism.

We plan to launch large-scale surveys to accompany the planning of such large urban infrastructure projects. We want to find out, whether city residents aim for more input legitimacy (participation in the planning stage), throughput legitimacy (transparency of the processes), output legitimacy (the quality of built houses and infrastructure), or outcome legitimacy (externalities of built houses and infrastructure for residents).