Landscape and Urban Governance: Participatory Planning of the Public Realm in Saida, Lebanon

Jala Makhzoumi,Salwa Al-Sabbagh

doi:10.3390/land7020048

Abstract

The political shift in Lebanon since the 1990s towards market-led development has encouraged the incremental appropriation of public spaces and state lands, and their conversion into gated, monitored enclaves that serve a privileged few. The process disregards the role of the urban public realm and undermines its potential as an inclusive space and enabling platform for urban governance. This article advocates a participatory approach to urban development, one that engages local stakeholders, institutions, and the public at large as active partners working towards sustainable urban futures. We draw on a case study in Saida, Lebanon, to illustrate participatory planning methods and demonstrate the role of landscape architects in enabling community-led development that is place responsive and sensitive to local narratives of heritage and identity. The project’s participatory methodology and landscape architecture’s expansive framing, the paper argues, democratizes the planning process and contributes to urban governance that empowers local authorities and local stakeholders in the face of privatization and market-led development.

Highlights

Accepting participatory planning as the starting point, this article aims to explore this approach and whether landscape architects can play a role in participatory planning that can contribute to urban governance
Revisiting the premise posed at the outset of this article: does an expansive landscape design framing contribute to urban governance? If yes, why and how is its contribution different from, and complementary to, the participatory approach of the Saida USUDS project? Drawing on the participatory and transdisciplinary approach of the MedCities as applied in Saida, we posit that the
“Landscape, Environment, and Ecology” track was the most enduring of the five project tracks. This statement is based on the number of community initiatives inspired by the landscape framing during the course of the USUDS project (2012–2014) and those enabled by the project strategic vision after the project ended

Summary

Introduction

The gradual change in postwar Western democracies from the ‘traditional’, top-heavy conception of government, the ‘direct provider’ of welfare and services, towards a bottom-up, decentralized model reflects widespread belief that the ideal place for democratic training and debate is at the local level [1,2,3]. The latter is argued on the premise that the system of values and norms are more homogeneous at the urban, i.e., city, level than at the national one. Participatory methods, whether applied to governance, While ‘government’ refers to “the formal institutional structure and location of authoritative decision-making in the modern state”, ‘governance’ signifies new processes of governing and new methods by which society is governed, and a focus on the interdependence of governmental and non-governmental organizations working together [5] (p. 34)

Objectives

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion