- Participatory Local Democracy: The Key to Urban Liveability & Investment in South Africa and the Netherlands    1706 kb by    Geerse, Andries & van Geest, Tom | andries@stedenbouwkundige.nl    Short Outline Our approach to community participation, demonstrated through two of our projects in South Africa and the Netherlands, direct local investment without big government or developers. Instead people are empowered to control their own urban future. Abstract This article will present our approach to meaningful, effective community participation, focusing on two of our projects, one in South Africa and one in the Netherlands. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, middle class South Africans have increasingly demanded a voice in local issues. Like urban communities across the country, the municipality of Camdeboo struggles to providing affordable housing for this “gap market” of mostly young professionals who do not qualify for free government housing but also cannot afford private market housing. Working together with our municipal client and other partners, we facilitated a series of workshops attended by over 140 future residents, community leaders and local entrepreneurs. These demonstrated how to productively engage the local population in neighbourhood design, from the strategic level down to the architectural level. The project also demonstrated how participation can effectively direct limited resources, in this case $70 million, to what matters most to the community. With our clients in the Netherlands we use a similar approach. In the Harbour Quarter of the municipality of Deventer, we in fact use the same techniques but with a different outcome: attracting investment and stimulating organic development of initiatives in working, living, culture and sustainability. While the historic buildings of the Harbour Quarter provide fertile ground for new initiatives, seeding true organic growth demands that local inhabitants and entrepreneurs be the drivers. Through this participatory process, potential initiators are identified and engaged. Then by focusing on each of their unique needs, we create room for their ideas and spur their creativity in this $350 million development. Community engagement therefore becomes a tool to facilitate innovation and leverage investment. These projects demonstrate a different way of directing community investment—without the direction of big developers or big government. Instead, people are empowered to direct investments in their community so that they control the liveability and investments in their urban future. Keywords community participation, local investment, neighbourhood design, organic growth, sustainability Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2011: LIVEABLE CITIES: URBANISING WORLD, Meeting the Challenge   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper