Multilateral communication in processes of urban development

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Klaus Selle
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 266709055

The traditional, bilaterally structured citizen participation (on the one hand "the planning", on the other "the public") in the practice of urban planning and development has been gradually turning into a multilateral communication - understood as differentiating involvement of a wide range of stakeholders in the municipal opinion forming and decision making. Expression of the differentiation of the stakeholders is often the selective use of different forms of communication - e.g. interviews with key players, administration workshops, cooperative workshops or conferences to develop urban neighborhoods - that are combined to process-related strategies. Such entire processes have not yet been explored. In order to overcome this research deficit, (1) multilateral communication processes in different practical contexts of urban development will be described systematically, (2) hypotheses about possible interrelationships between stakeholders, goals, content and contexts on the one hand and the respective chosen strategies and communicative elements on the other hand will be examined, (3) the perspective of involved parties in the process (beginning with their participation interests up to the assessment of output) will be captured and analyzed for correlations between process design and process progression. This will take place in a three-stage design study: - The systematic description of multilateral communication processes at three levels (property/district/city) will be the the basis for the selection of case studies. - The examination of potential interrelationships and the capturing of the stakeholders perspectives will necessarily presuppose an exploration of the respective processes and the inclusion of a large group of stakeholders. This will be done in about 12 case studies. - With a panel of experts from a wide range of science and practice, the hypotheses and questions of the project will be discussed and the generalizability of the findings from the case studies will be examined. The entire research process will be accompanied by an international composed dialogue group.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants