- The danger of community engagement as an exclusion tool - four case studies in four different scales in Brasilia, Brazil   622 kb by    De Souza Tenorio, Gabriela | gabrielastenorio@gmail.com    Short Outline The necessary community engagement must be put into perspective. Most individuals have difficult to think in a systemic, global way, while contributing to their cities' planning processes. In all intervention scales, it is very hard to have inclusive contributions without previous education on the global implications of their local desires. Abstract Community engagement, though it is becoming more and more indispensable in any planning process, must always be put into perspective. This paper aims at showing that most individuals have difficult to think in a systemic, global way, while contributing to their cities' planning processes. In all intervention scales, it is very hard to have inclusive community engagement without previous education on the global implications of their local desires. According to the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), an American organization that carries out work on public spaces on the basis of public participation, the community ''is anyone that has a stake in participating in a particular place''. It comprises residents, the owners of businesses, workers, members of institutions (such as schools or churches), official representatives and various groups with ties to the area. For this reason, interviews, discussion groups and meetings are useful activities to enable people directly involved in the questioned reality to show their feelings and become involved in the process of its creation, by expressing their needs and hopes. Education introduces a collective spirit to the field of decision-making, clarifies the role and nature of public realm and shows its value to the city and society. It should be stressed that places in a city do not belong to the residents around it: they belong to the city. The paper illustrates how community engagement can show intolerance and wishes of segregation with four case studies that have taken place in Brasília, Brazil, in recent years. The first, at a very local scale, tells the story of a plaza designed and maintained by the residents around it. The result was a pleasant place that began to attract people from elsewhere. However, two years later, after being bothered by some undesirable night customers, and having difficulty in getting rid of them, the residents decided to request the local administration to destroy some of its features. This was exactly what was done. The second, at a neighborhood scale, shows how a high middle/rich class borough have voted against the construction of a public school in the surroundings, explaining that their children will not attend to it. The third case, at an urban scale, shows the rage against the land use transformation along a transit corridor that nowadays supports commerce and services only on one side. Finally, the last example, informs us about a rich neighborhood of suburban houses located in a peninsula, which resists the idea of creating a second bridge that could distribute traffic in a better way for everybody living in the surroundings. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper