Can Participatory Activities Enable Creativity in Urban Planning? An Observatory in Action Approach

Many planning experiences show the plurality and diversification of the planning tasks. Such a plurality and diversification is mainly due to the more and more crucial need of the planners to reinterpret their planning roles out of institutional protocols and to develop always new communication frameworks which have to be deeply rooted in the contexts of planning. Contexts are the results of evolving interdependencies between spaces and communities and are no longer manageable within whatever complex or general set of rules. As a consequence, communication in planning cannot be considered relying on participatory activities carried out within pre-structured planning protocols or simply considered as some of the several activities of the planning process. Coherently with this vision, we challenge in this paper the conception of planning as a process for capturing and using knowledges by rethinking it as a process to be continuously shifted and adapted towards crucial cognitive resources which are hard to be involved in planning processes by the use of pre-structured participatory protocols. By crucial cognitive resources we mean dispersed but crucial knowledges which are active exclusively within social mechanisms regulating the interdependencies between communities and their spaces. In the first part we critically reflect on the connections between creativity and participative planning and highlight some pitfalls underlying the current way of considering knowledge generation in them. In the second part of this paper we describe an observatory way to carry out a participative planning action and an evolutionary way to conceive communication protocols in action which draws on our experience in different planning contexts. Rethink participation as an “observatory in action” implies focusing on the dynamic processes through which planning issues are collectively constructed and on the modalities through which those collective constructions interact with or could influence the planning tasks in order to produce creative opportunities for planning actions. It aims at intercepting crucial cognitive resources able to invent new possibilities of action. Finally, we highlight some of the challenges that such an “observatory in action” approach poses to current participative planning practices. Specifically we argue for the need of reconceptualizing knowledge and roles within current communicative planning activities.