Citizen Participation in the Built Environment: In a Commons Perspective

Citizen participation in the built environment in this abstract covers the participation through the lens of the citizens. The built environment is seen as a common good between private, public and club goods with high subtractability and difficult exclusion as defined by Elinor Ostrom (the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences), who developed the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD). IAD is a tool for understanding the decision-making process and the governance of the common pool resource. In this abstract the selected common pool resource is a demolished lock in Alblasserdam, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands. A group of citizens starts an initiative with presenting a plan of approach to restore the lock to the local government. This initiative is a bottom-up initiative. The lock is in a primary flood defense (dyke). This means in Netherlands that the Waterboard Rivierenland, Province Zuid-Holland and Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management are stakeholders. IAD visualizes the position of the exogenous variables (biophysical / material conditions, attributes of the community and rules), the action arena with participants and action situations, interaction between action arena and valuative criteria, outcomes and feedback to action arena and exogenous variables. An initiative can also be top-down in the case that citizens are asked to participate and hybrid in the case of alternate initiatives. Furthermore the participation ladder (Sherry Arnstein in 1969) with 8 rungs can be used to value the engagement of the citizens in the decision making process as nonparticipation, degrees of tokenism and degrees of citizen power.