Participatory Planning in the Age of Polarization: Can It Still Work?
- Melike Şenkal
- May 30
- 8 min read
Updated: May 31
In an era marked by growing social divides and declining public trust, the promise of participatory planning faces new challenges. Once celebrated as a tool to democratize decision-making, participatory planning must now adapt to a more complex landscape shaped by digital disruption, political polarization, and persistent inequities. Can participatory approaches still deliver meaningful, inclusive outcomes in today’s urban environments?
This blog explores how cities are rethinking civic engagement through digital tools, inclusive governance models, and community-driven initiatives.
What is Participatory Planning?
Participatory planning is an approach to urban and regional development that actively involves community members in decision-making processes. Unlike traditional top-down planning models, which rely solely on expert opinion or government directives, participatory planning emphasizes collaboration between planners, policymakers, and the public. It recognizes that local residents possess valuable lived experiences and insights that can lead to more inclusive, context-sensitive, and sustainable urban outcomes.
At its core, participatory planning is both a process and a philosophy. It is about giving people a voice in shaping the spaces they inhabit—be it in designing public parks, influencing transportation networks, or allocating city budgets. The process often includes public meetings, workshops, surveys, online platforms, and design charrettes where community members can contribute ideas, raise concerns, and work alongside professionals to co-create solutions. This form of engagement not only enhances the democratic legitimacy of planning decisions but also builds public trust and ownership.
Importantly, participatory planning is not a one-size-fits-all method. Its success depends on how equitably it includes diverse voices—particularly those from marginalized or underrepresented communities. When designed thoughtfully, it can bridge the gap between citizens and institutions, promote social justice, and help address deep-rooted inequalities in urban development. However, when executed poorly or superficially, it risks becoming tokenistic, serving as a checkbox exercise rather than a meaningful mechanism for change.
Why Participatory Planning Still Matters
Participatory planning is the backbone of inclusive urban governance. By involving residents directly in shaping their neighborhoods, it fosters transparency, trust, and local ownership. But as societies become more fragmented—politically, economically, and culturally—the effectiveness of these processes is being tested.
From heated public hearings to online misinformation campaigns, engagement is often hijacked or hindered by division. Moreover, marginalized communities frequently remain underrepresented in planning dialogues, further widening the equity gap.
The New Tools of Engagement: Digital Participation Platforms
Digital technologies are offering new avenues for engagement that transcend traditional town halls. Platforms like Decidim (Barcelona), CONSUL (Madrid), and Polis (used by governments in Taiwan and Canada) allow citizens to participate in policy development, budgeting, and urban design discussions directly from their devices. These tools provide:
Transparent forums for dialogue.
Data dashboards to track public feedback.
Integration with government decision-making processes.
Decidim (Barcelona)
Decidim (Catalan for “we decide”) is a free/libre, open-source digital infrastructure for participatory democracy. Originally developed by Barcelona’s City Council (2016) and civic groups, it is now maintained by a non-profit Decidim association and a global community. The platform lets any organization (city, NGO, university, etc.) create flexible participation processes (strategic planning, consultations, budgeting, etc.) with components like citizen proposals, debates, petitions, votes and meetings. Decidim emphasizes transparency and integrity, with secure voting, results tracking, and a social contract of democratic values. It is configured and extended collaboratively via the Metadecidim community on GitHub.
Its key features are:
Multi‐phase participatory processes (e.g. budgeting, planning, public consultations)
Citizen initiatives/proposals with commenting and support
Deliberation tools (upvote/downvote comments, debates)
Secure e-voting modules with thresholds and result publication
Meeting/assembly scheduling and minute publication
Accountability tracking (turning proposals into public-policy “results” with progress indicators)
Surveys and events management.
Usage & Data: Decidim.Barcelona (as of 2018) had ~30,000 registered users, 35 participatory processes and 13,297 proposals (9,196 of which led to policy outcomes). A Barcelona participatory budget (2019) saw ~40,000 voters and 55,000 votes cast, with 56,578 new users registering on Decidim. Worldwide, over 300 cities and organizations use Decidim (70+ known instances, including EU citizens’ initiatives and cooperatives), with an estimated 700,000 registered participants globally. (The platform code and docs are on GitHub, with dozens of contributors.)
CONSUL (Madrid)
Consul (stylized CONSUL Democracy) is a free open-source civic tech platform originally developed by Madrid’s City Council (launched as “Decide Madrid” in 2015). It enables direct citizen participation by letting people propose policy ideas, vote on them, debate, and co-draft laws or budget priorities. The software (licensed AGPL) is maintained by the Consul Democracy Foundation (founded 2019, based in the Netherlands). Governance is community-driven: the Madrid government initially developed it, and today a nonprofit foundation and network of tech partners coordinate support and development.
Its key features are:
Citizen proposals (any user submits a detailed idea for a new law/project)
Support phase (citizens back proposals, requiring e.g. 1% of population support to advance)
Deliberative debates (forums for proposal discussion, including commenting and “crowd-law” annotation of draft regulations)
Voting and referendums (secure online ballots, often two-stage: initial support threshold, then vote for/against)
Participatory budgeting (citizens plan spending: e.g. Madrid allocates €100M/year via projects proposed and voted by users)
Collaborative law-making (“crowd-law” where users annotate proposed legislation)
Public consultations (surveys or polls on key issues). The platform is highly configurable and is used for open budgeting, petitions, surveys and citizen assemblies in various cities.
Usage & Data: In Madrid alone, over 400,000 residents (of ~2.7M adult population) had registered on Decide Madrid by 2022. Citizens have submitted hundreds of thousands of votes: Madrid reports ~€360 million worth of citizen-proposed projects in total. Globally, Consul Democracy notes ~250 city/region implementations. An EU report states the software now powers platforms in 30+ countries (100+ institutions), reaching some 90 million citizens. (The Madrid site alone attracted tens of thousands of participants to its first budgeting round.) The platform’s open code and community-driven model mean usage data are tracked on public dashboards.
Polis (Taiwan and Canada)
Polis (often written “Pol.is”) is an open-source deliberation tool developed by the Computational Democracy Project (a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit). It is designed to surface consensus opinions in large-group discussions. Participants post short statements on a topic, and others upvote/downvote these statements (they cannot reply directly to each comment). A machine-learning algorithm then clusters similar users and highlights statements that achieve broad agreement across different viewpoints. In effect, Polis “gamifies” consensus-building by giving prominence to ideas that many people from diverse groups support. The code is AGPL and free to use, with no centralized “server” – organizations set up their own instances when needed.
Its key features are:
Topic conversation maps – visualizations of agreement clusters across participants (real-time group position graphs)
No threaded replies (to avoid echo-chambers)
Upvote/downvote on statements (“agree/disagree” buttons)
Automatic identification of consensus statements vs. divisive statements
Exportable data and analytics (participation dashboards).
Policymakers can then hold follow-up dialogs or decision meetings based on the identified consensus points.
For example, Taiwan – vTaiwan and Join: The national civic tech platform vTaiwan (launched 2015) extensively uses Polis for consensus discussions on contentious issues (from Uber regulation to AI policy).
Taiwan credits Polis with facilitating consensus on over 26 issues, 80% of which led to government action. In 2025 vTaiwan was still active (including new AI and policy initiatives).
An other example is Canada – Ontario Anti-Racism Consultation (2018): the provincial government used a Polis survey to gather public input on anti-racism strategies.
Other adoptions: Polis has been used in the U.S., Singapore, Philippines and by civic groups in Europe.
Usage & Data: The largest deployment is vTaiwan: case studies report 200,000+ participants over multiple years. (Taiwan’s population is ~23M.) In 2020-21, a Uruguay referendum-related Polis saw ~16,500 participants casting ~295,000 votes on statements. Austria’s Klimarat citizen assembly (2022) reached ~5,000 citizens via Polis. In Ontario (2018) and elsewhere, thousands of submissions and votes have been recorded (exact numbers are project-specific). These examples show Polis can engage tens of thousands in a single topic. (Because each deployment is event-based, there is no single global “user count” like a registered base.)
Participatory Budgeting: Empowering Local Voices
One of the most successful applications of participatory planning has been participatory budgeting (PB). Originating in Porto Alegre, Brazil, PB has now spread to over 7,000 cities worldwide.
In New York City, residents can vote on how to spend portions of the municipal budget—such as funding for parks, schools, or street improvements. Similarly, in Paris, 5% of the city’s total investment budget is decided through public voting.
Participatory budgeting has shown positive impacts:
Increased civic engagement, particularly among youth and low-income groups.
Enhanced transparency in local governance.
Direct community impact in underfunded neighborhoods.
Co-Designing with Communities: Beyond Token Participation
Participatory planning should move beyond consultation and into co-design—where communities shape projects from the ground up. Cities like Melbourne, Amsterdam, and Medellín are experimenting with models that give communities real agency over space and policy.
Key approaches include:
Design charrettes involving residents, planners, and architects.
Pop-up urban labs to test ideas in real-time.
Tactical urbanism projects driven by local groups.
These models ensure that the lived experiences of residents inform design, resulting in more context-sensitive and inclusive urban environments.
Overcoming Barriers to Meaningful Engagement
To make participatory planning work in polarized times, urban planners must:
Build long-term trust with communities, especially those historically excluded.
Diversify engagement strategies, combining face-to-face and online tools.
Protect participatory spaces from politicization and disinformation.
Prioritize equity by designing inclusive processes that uplift marginalized voices.
Participatory planning is not a one-size-fits-all solution—but when adapted thoughtfully, it remains a powerful tool to reclaim democratic space in urban governance.
Final Thoughts: Participation as an Antidote to Polarization
In the face of rising political polarization, economic inequality, and public distrust in institutions, participatory planning stands out as a powerful and necessary tool. At its best, it redefines governance by centering local voices, redistributing power, and making planning processes more inclusive, transparent, and accountable. In cities across the globe, from Barcelona to Taipei to New York, we see inspiring examples of how participatory models—especially those enhanced through digital platforms—can reinvigorate democracy at the local level.
However, the effectiveness of participatory planning today hinges on how sincerely it is implemented. Token efforts—where public input is solicited but ignored, or where participation is limited to those with the most time, access, or privilege—can deepen cynicism and further entrench divisions. Real participation requires much more: it demands a long-term commitment to inclusive outreach, capacity-building, and institutional responsiveness. It also means acknowledging and addressing structural barriers that prevent certain groups from fully participating—such as digital inequality, language barriers, and histories of marginalization.
To move forward, planners and policymakers must rethink engagement not just as a task, but as a democratic practice. This involves creating participatory processes that are not only wide-reaching but also deliberative, empathetic, and equity-driven. Whether through participatory budgeting, co-design workshops, or digital platforms like Decidim or Polis, the goal should be to create a planning culture where people feel heard, empowered, and invested in the future of their communities.
In this age of polarization, participatory planning is more than a planning method—it is a democratic safeguard. It helps communities surface shared values, negotiate differences, and imagine collective futures. As planners, policymakers, and citizens, we must continually ask not only how to engage, but whom we are engaging, whose voices are missing, and how those voices can shape decision-making in meaningful ways.
Ultimately, the future of participatory planning lies in its ability to adapt—embracing new tools, strengthening old practices, and staying grounded in the core belief that cities work best when they work for everyone.
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