Territory as space for the democratic radicalization. A critical approach to the processes of citizen participation in urban policies in Madrid and Barcelona

Abstract

In recent years, citizen participation in urban planning and management has experienced a further expansion in Spain. This is due to legal changes which favor their incorporation into urban planning agenda, and the interest of public authorities to develop participatory processes in the field of urbanism. The proliferation of these experiences of participation has generated a wide casuistry with very different results. However, studies on citizen participation only address this variation, focusing almost exclusively on the discussion about the goodness of incorporating the participation, without addressing the diversity of substantive performance of it. In this article, I propose to discuss this issue focusing on the results of a research on citizen participation in the urban regeneration policies of Madrid and Barcelona.