Public Input/Elite Privilege: The Use of Participatory Planning to Reinforce Urban Geographies of Power in Seattle

This article begins to address why cities continue to use public participation-based planning processes to shape their public spaces, notwithstanding three decades of criticisms of such approaches. Based on ethnographic, activist participant research into Seattle Washington's planning for public skateboard parks, I argue that the mobilization of two ostensibly incompatible paradigms for planning—one vesting discretionary authority in experts, the other using the planner to develop consensus through inclusive public input processes—are popular precisely because they can be used together to frustrate truly democratic urban planning. This case study demonstrates how elites used the public input garnered by planners as a form of "shadow referendum," determining in advance whether there were any powerful actors that might oppose proposed policies. And by shifting between or combining the two planning models these elites could justify adhering to the demands of powerful neighborhoods, while discarding input from less powerful neighborhoods as politically irrelevant.