Spaces for Reversed Participation in Urban Transitions: Exploratory Dialogical Workshops with Civil and Formal Activist Planners in Oslo

The role of civil society in sustainable and just transitions has gained increased attention in research and in urban policies and planning. Planning theory and practice are searching for new ways to reorient and readdress sustainable transitions, allowing for less complete and more experimental approaches to contextual social-ecological connections. Sager (2016, 2018) frames the concept of “activist planning” to describe how intentional communities, as well as formal government actors, work strategically with alternative and radical development approaches to urban transitions. However, less attention has been given to how spaces of interaction between government and civil society actors are generated and reciprocated. Such participatory spaces do not emerge on their own. Rather, participation is often confined to either invited spaces “inside the planning system”– where the municipality invites citizens to respond to defined planning purposes, or in “claimed spaces” – where civil society interacts “outside the planning system” (Cornwall, 2008). In this paper we explore how “intermediary spaces” for participation between government and civil society actors can be generated to facilitate better collaboration, without the citizens’ initiatives being stripped of their self-governance and motivation. Our research shows that creating “intermediary spaces” through exploratory dialogical workshops can facilitate a form of “reversed participation.” As opposed to invited spaces where municipal policies and plans form the outset for participation, these workshops were shaped based on the citizens’ initiatives and projects. The workshops generated improved understanding of and learning about challenges and opportunities for long-term development of citizens’ community initiatives, collaborations with the municipality, and new models for supportive and collaborative actions between citizens’ initiatives and formal government actors.