4. THREE OPPOSING TENSIONS: A READING OF CURRENT URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS IN GLOBALIZATION
Experience accumulated in these last few years by the cities experimenting participation did highlight some problematic areas, crucial in order to face the shallows onto which public policies and attempts at grassroots organizing have often sunk. Focusing on them can help us proceed further along the courses traveled so far and boost the power of participatory processes to actively and positively influence everyday reality for the population of so many cities and towns participating.
Each of these contexts comes across with its specificity and pecularities due to the differences in culture, experience, socio-economic condition, territorial organization and administrative-political system; our effort will be to try and understand which are the common challenges to face in the near future.
Some opposing “tensions” seem to generate the problem area we have defined as the challenges of participation:
• The tension between inclusion and exclusion, those inside and those outside, those integrated within the city and those marginalized from social and political life, with limited access to goods and material resources. This does not only concern the economic sphere, but first and foremost, the cultural one and more in general, the issue of living together within equality and differences.
• The tension between top-down and bottom-up opposing a hierarchical approach “from above” to one based on local resources and demands, often translates into tension between institutions unable to reap this wealth coming from society, acting as agents of “repression” rather than as “catalyzers”, and social groups capable of activating projects or initiatives from below, sometimes in the total absence of power and resources, such as to make survival impossible without institutional support, in other instances, stronger and able to self-organize and self-promote new ways of living, of inhabiting, producing, consuming and building spaces according to ideals and criteria closer to their individual and collective aspirations.
• The tension between marginal and central areas no longer corresponding to the traditional contraposition “downtown-suburbia” where the center is the city area that offers opportunities and quality of life, while suburbia is the place expelling functions and undesired populations or, on to a broader scale, the place of economic and cultural backwardness of the areas more distant from the metropolis. The “downtown”, the “center”, often presents itself as a concentrate of problem issues and marginalized populations, while “suburbia” begins to become a refuge for the affluent part of society running away from unlivable cities, as a consequence, we see territorial models of difficult reading, characterized by an often unpredictable alternance between areas where capitals and opportunities are concentrated and areas excluded from these important fluxes.
Understandably, these tensions intertwine and overlap in generating problems, making it difficult for self-organization within local communities, as well as for the implementation of effective public policies capable of meeting social demands, reaching out for the excluded and raising the quality of life.
The odds for winning these challenges are tied to the overcoming of these three tension factors and thus the possibility to construct shared solutions as alternatives to the traditional model producing the tension factors in the first place.

1. Inclusion / Exclusion: towards the construction of a community culture

Participation and the construction of a collective knowledge
The construction of collective knowledge is a primary condition for the active and conscious involvement of a number of individuals within decisional processes. The possibility to construct this knowledge is based upon the re-definition of the relationship between “street level knowledge” and “expert knowledge”, upon the re-construction of the public space and the appreciation of the new forms of social communication.
Challenges to face in this field are:
• Translate technical languages and make communication effective, without losing quality of contents. In order to reach this objective it is necessary to redefine the role of “expert knowledge”, capable of receiving the elements of innovation, making them available to participatory processes. It is necessary to look at “expert knowledge” as “one of the many contributions”, one that does not hierarchically set itself against all other forms of knowledge, but is capable to communicate with a wide system of diverse players. This means the appreciation of knowledge linked to experience and direct practice, to the real life of places, oral tales, collective narratives. Often it is difficult to have diverse and different knowledge collaborate: on the one hand due to the mistrust of the population, since expert knowledge is manipulated in order to legimitize political choices, on the other, experts do not assign any validity to “common knowledge” (contextual) coming from the population.
• Rebuild public space (also immaterial) as the place of social communication. Public places of the city play a very important role in the “regeneration of the agora”, of the spontaneous modes of socially coming together, meeting, discussing and confronting. Policies and projects concerning the organization of public places should encourage forms of conviviality and meeting and rebuilding the habit of daily living within open urban spaces, meant as the primary places of social communication and of the construction of collective awareness and knowledge. In reality, the disappearance of public space is an emerging phenomenon in European cities, where forms of restrictions and control of convivial places are on the rise. It is necessary to face the problem of reconstructing the forms of interaction in the city with new tools, opposing the dissolution of public space which can only encourage exclusion and social isolation, the “privatization” of collective problems and consciousnesses.
• Encourage forms of expression using new media (multimedia, street tv, digital networks, etc.) as well as the restoration of meaning to urban spaces (public art, temporary installations, unforeseen modes of space use, etc.). Information and communication produced and diffused in a horizontal manner by the social fabric are playing an important and growing role today among young generations in building socially accessible, capillary, innovative communication. This type of communication often operates a “reversal” of the negative stigma assigned to some “decayed” neighbourhoods, re-processing their image starting from local resources and not from the problems, fundamental for the priming of social and urban regeneration processes.

Participation and construction of social ties
Interception and involvement of weak players, usually excluded from decisional processes, offers the opportunity to build new forms of social ties addressing a quickly evolving society:
• The challenge to be faced in this field concerns the experimentation of heretofore unheard of forms of social inclusion, creating the conditions to produce equal opportunities in accessing primary resources (education, healthcare, employment) for all citizens. It is necessary to activate local social resources, overcoming the risks of assistance and, together with the weak players, define a strategic, integrated vision of development (of their own empowerment).
• Such measures should ensure an ever more open access to the rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to housing, employment and a decent life and involve a delicate and difficult reflection over the dialectic between legality and illegality (this reflection is included, for instance, in some steering papers by Unesco over the treatment of informal dwelling settlements and the squatting of lands under conditions of impossibility of access to these commodities by large segments of population) which has always been the engine of social innovation and has brought to life new rights and normative systems, addressing requests coming from the society.
• It is necessary to give dignity to the forms of knowledge borne different cultures and make them emerge; e.g., visions of the world and daily life linked to all too often ignored value systems that can stimulate the creation of completely new points of view necessary for the innovation of social interaction’s practices in a multi-ethnic and plural world and the construction of coexistance pacts based upon the reciprocity of rights and duties.

2. Top-down / Bottom-up: a new governance, where the initiatives of institutions and citizens converge
The difficult integration between institutional policy and civil society requires the construction of a new pact between institutions and citizens; the tools and modes of traditional politics are insufficient. To accept this challenge, institutions must deeply renovate themselves in terms of organizing structure and procedures.

Participitation and renewal of politics
The crisis of democracy and the traditional forms of representation is due to many factors and current elements common to European society as a whole (the downfall of ideologies, large political parties and trade unions representativity crisis, social atomization, mistrust and lack of interest on the part of the citizens about “their administration”, etc.)

• The challenge coming from participation concerns the possibility to renew traditional forms of delegate democracy, integrating it with the practices of participatory democracy. It is necessary to create a new relationship of mutual trust between citizens and politicians, appreciating the requests and methods emerging from social movements and their ability in building networks, representing vested interests and territories, expressing political subjectivity and assuming responsibility towards the whole community.
• Another point of innovation in traditional politics touches the issue of power re-distribution, i.e. the necessity to re-define politics as an opening to social dialogue, as mature democracy and a new synthesis of many individualities, allowing citizens to influence the decisions. This step poses the problem of the re-definition of roles and responsibilities: when institutional politics decides to appreciate the forms of active citizenship and construct ongoing social dialogue with individual citizens, it embodies a fundamental role of guarantee for the quality of the final decision taken, the ownership and transparency of the process and respect for the outcomes stemming from shared decisions.
• Institutions open to participatory processes must understand their own role not just in a pro-active way, but also as a surrendering of spaces for self-determination to local communities; not in terms of the abdication of responsibilities, but rather as a possibility for the inner resources of that given community to strengthen and develop.

Participation and innovation of the administrative structure
One of the main problems encountered while implementing participatory practices and in the concrete realization of projects socially produced concerned procedures, the working of institutions (bureaucracy, rules and regulations, scheduling, etc.) and the sectoriality of the administrative behemoth (people from different departments not cooperating with each other, rigidity in the division of tasks, poor attitude towards cooperation, etc.). The necessity for an integrated approach to public policies will have to face these challenges.
• Participation implies a radical transformation of the administrative culture and reorganization of the structure, because it cannot be a sector among the many operated by a single councillor, but a way to understand politics that must cut cross institutional action at large in an integrated way. That is why it must become an ordinary form of governing the territory and impact the entire decision-making system regarding public policies.
• It is necessary to extend the principle of subsidiariety (ultimate decision belongs to the governmental level “closer” to the problem) in more than one direction: from inter-institutional cooperation among the same levels of government to the re-definition of the role of intermediate players, from the appreciation of the city administration and decentralized systems (agglomeration, metro regions, mountain community, etc.)
• Another challenge is that of the formalization of participatory practices. The institutionalization of participation can represent a danger of rigidity for a very complex form of socio-political interaction, diversified by its own nature in methods and forms. Current debate on the theme however, agrees on the need for institutions to ensure the real feasibility of participation, the implementation of decisions made (facilities, training of new professional figures, financial resources, etc.) the appreciation of the spontaneous processes.

3. Centrality / Marginality: shared and sustainable development models based on the identities of places, local economies and cooperative networks
The third tension factor, the one between central and marginal areas, points us in the direction of social and spatial organizational modes and therefore to the patterns of settlement adopted by diverse societies in time. All the differences offered to us by the history of peoples are nowadays nullified by a sort of “single model” of “metropolization” of the world, threatening the richness and diversity of spontaneous architecture, local identity, lifestyles and production/consumption modes. The last challenge for participation deals with this: a support-oriented, participating community formulating the decisions concerning its future must come to terms with the problem of re-defining a sustainable, shared development model based on the appreciation of the identity of places, local economy, non-hierarchical dwelling models, but also forms of solidarity and cooperation networks overcoming the contraposition center-periphery, downtowm-suburbia, thereby producing a new idea of beauty.

Participation, sustainability and strategic horizon
A community really wanting to be responsible for its own future and really capable of bettering its own living standards must also consciously face issues going beyond the micro-local scale and the policies of urban re-qualification. However, there is a tendency to exclude strategic choices (what to produce and how, on what to base an idea of progress and development, what to consider a common good and how to ensure common access to it by everyone and by the future generations) from the debate, choices that inform those same public policies in which citizens are asked to participate. The possibility to interact is often open only downstream of decision-making processes and over small scale issues The challenge in this field is to begin experimental endeavors also at the level of strategic choices, relating the level of the local problems to global phenomena often escaping the control of local communities. Within local as a strategic choice and as a field of action close to the physical bodies of people, there is an opportunity to renew politics, to better the capacity of government of municipalities with respect to action on the part of outside forces, but also to build cooperation networks among places, even distant ones, making environmentally sound territories and economies competitive on global markets

Conclusion : Participation and beauty
Participation is not only a procedural problem neutral to the outcome of choices; it has to attain concrete results Participation is also the most effective method to ensure the quality of processes, buildings, collective spaces, cities. Participation can allow for a coming together of ethics (equality and sustainability in the use and distribution of resources) and aesthetics (the outcome of participatory process, equal expectations of citizens, beauty and quality of collective work). The last challenge for participation stems from this awareness: places transformed by citizens through the union of an experimental, brave “expert knowledge” with a deep and sensitive “local knowledge”, adhere to the bodies of communities, are created with sensible care, they last and get better with time, use local, environmental- friendly materials. Things created within participation are therefore nicer and more confortable than standard products - hostile and cold towards local cultures - deriving from globalizing processes forced from above and outside.

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