Exploring how the public’s voice can be more effectively incorporated in the front-end of a project: The Museumpark case

Abstract

Infrastructure and urban development projects continue to experience problems and tensions when it comes to external stakeholders, even though the importance of collaboration and dialogue between the external stakeholders and project developers is being increasingly stressed. There seems to be a lack of supporting policy and management strategies for better involvement of the public in public projects and confusion and uncertainty from the project developers’ side on how to engage with them in a more constructive way.

This research looks into how the public’s voice can be more adequately incorporated in public projects in the front-end, where the course the project will follow is set, and its values and relationships with stakeholders defined, in order to improve the collaboration between public governing bodies and their citizens. It does so by analysing an example of public projects with unsuccessful public participation that resulted in conflict: the Museumpark case, where the municipality of Rotterdam decided to make changes to the previous large asphalted square in-between Rotterdam’s most known museums by following standard greening designs. The issue was that this square was one of the most popular skating spots in the city with a growing community. Different disciplines that fall under the skating umbrella could be seen in the square, the main ones being skateboarding, longboarding and rollerskating. Besides these, other urban sports and styles were part of the scene, such as freestyle dancers, hoola-hoopers, and so on. Unbeknownst to the community, the redevelopment plans were progressing, and they only found out about the changes that would happen when the decision was finalised. Because the decision-making was done without consulting the skaters, this led to resistance from them, council debates, a delayed project, and growing distrust about the municipality from the community.

The aim of this research is to to understand current issues commonly faced in projects in the public sector in management, communication and stakeholder participation design, and to highlight strategies to improve public engagement in public projects.

The result of the research is a conceptual framework with strategies derived from the prevailing issues found in literature and what went wrong in practice (as seen in the empirical case). Novel participation methods and alternative approaches for external stakeholder engagement in culturally sensitive projects are needed more in practice in order to reduce the risk of problems occurring in projects or resistance. By testing these strategies in practice, a push is made towards a more inclusive participation, better communication between project developers and the public or the governmental body and the public, more inclusion of social values in projects, higher transparency and authenticity, and implementation of innovative ideas that come from the public’s knowledge.