Short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic study conducted in a PPP in Vienna, Austria, this contribution tackles the questions of what citizen participation does and how it creates a public in order to address the larger question of how participation practices reproduce certain imaginaries about the local democracy.

Long abstract:

This academic paper contribution takes citizen participation in the context of urban renewal in Vienna, Austria, as its object of study. I tackle the questions of what citizen participation does and how it creates a public in order to address the larger question of how participation practices reproduce certain imaginaries about the local democracy. I argue that ideas about participation and democracy on the one hand and the tools and technologies policymakers have at hand to conduct participation practices and represent its outcomes on the other hand are co-produced. Like other aspects of urban renewal policies, participation practices are influenced by broader norms. For instance, the democratic principle of the majority rule is echoed in the foregrounding of participant numbers in the data production process of citizen participation. The other way around, specific participation technologies such as genuinely performing inclusiveness reinforce a particular image of the local democracy, e.g. as representative of the relevant population. This creates legitimacy for the overall project of renewal and reinforces the image of a representative democratic system despite precisely the legitimacy invisibilizing whose participation is legible through the employed participation technologies and whose is not.

I base my analysis on ethnographic fieldwork I have conducted with an Urban Renewal Office, a public service facility enacted in a PPP between a Municipal Department and architectural firms. Here I have observed policymakers enact the citizen participation process accompanying the renewal of the road I give the pseudonym Theater Street.