Refiguring democratic participation in urban planning: posthumanist performative articulation of Decidim adaptation in Oslo

Local governments are increasingly turning to digital platforms in urban planning practices to improve democratic participation, but how do they become ‘democratic’? This paper explores this question through a qualitative study of the adaptation process of the digital participatory platform Decidim by the municipality in Oslo, Norway. Decidim is a particular kind of digital participatory platform, belonging to a technopolitical movement that normatively commits to develop technologies through democratic means for democratic purposes. While the design and use of Decidim have been the subject of multiple studies, little attention has been paid to the very process by which municipalities adapt Decidim into their urban planning practices. Thinking with Karen Barad’s posthumanist performativity, the analysis focuses on the reworkings and boundary-making practices that refigured power dynamics that unfolded in the adaptation process. Unlike approaching Decidim, the municipality, or citizens as pre-established actors, the adaptation process is approached as the phenomena from which different actors and digital-physical participatory spaces co-emerge. Through inquiring into the practices that differentiate one from another, this paper articulates how the technopolitical genealogy of Decidim interfered with the mattering of ownerships and identities shaping the participatory space. The analysis points to the tension between securing and opening the digital platform that also refigured the responsibility of actors. The findings have implications for the way in which digital participatory platforms are conceptualized in planning theory and what such platforms do to the materialization of power dynamics in participatory processes.