From Participation to the Right to the City: Democratic Place Management at the Neighbourhood Scale in Comparative Perspective

Public participation processes have become increasingly important as a means of structuring the relationship between states and citizens in managing processes of urban change, but continue to fall short of achieving significant democratization of urban governance. Through an examination of three bottom-up processes of citizen engagement in managing urban change at the scale of urban neighbourhoods-Bellavista in Santiago, Chile, Yanaka in Tokyo, Japan, and the Annex in Toronto, Canada-we find that when there exists strong, durable organizations with expertise, institutional memory, and neighbourhood self-governance capacity, such organizations are able to generate a powerful claim to the right to the city through their engagement in processes of urban change. We suggest that the right to the city is at its core a claim to a collective right to democratic engagement in the governance of particular spaces in the city, which gains power and legitimacy through inclusive deliberation and successful interventions, and that the neighbourhood scale provides a special resonance to these claims.