Rydin, Y; Natarajan, LC; (2016) The Materiality of Public Participation: the case of community consultation on spatial planning for North Northamptonshire, England. Local Environment , 21 (10) pp. 1243-1251. 10.1080/13549839.2015.1095718.

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Abstract

Within the social sciences, there has been a notable ‘material turn’, particularly within geography, anthropology and sociology, exploring the implications of the materiality of the world for how we live (Miller, 1998) and know (Latour, 1999, 2007). Anderson and Wylie (2009, p. 318) identify three particular clusters of ‘materialising’ activity: the work on material cultures looking at “meaningful practices of use and encounters with objects and environments”; interest in the “varied intertwined” materialities of nature, science and technology; and the materiality associated with “the spatialities of the lived body, practice, touch, emotion, and affect”. Yet the discussion of public participation – one of the most significant issues in urban and planning studies – remains largely divorced from these concerns with the materiality of the world. The work of Nortje Marres (Marres 2011, Marres & Lezaun 2011) is an interesting exception although she focuses on how participation may be understood through technological engagements. Our interest is in considering how the community consultation and engagement activities that take place within current planning processes can be more fully understood through a focus on their materiality. The following analysis, therefore, argues that public participation exercises involve more than just the communicative engagement of social actors with each other. Institutional means of shaping that communication and redressing power inequalities within participatory efforts are important but attention also needs to be paid to how the material is treated, recognised and incorporated as an active agent. Three dimensions of the materiality of such participatory efforts can be identified: the material as being mediated through communities’ experience of their environment (Ingold, 2011); materiality as shaping the nature of 2 participatory efforts through the physical location, the physical setting and the internal layout (Wates, 2000); and the role played by material artefacts (Bowker and Star, 1999).

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