Sustainable urbanisation and participatory governance in peripheral neighbourhoods: Insights from Bogotá

Résumé fourni par la source

Densely populated urban areas are under pressure to redirect their development trajectories towards more sustainable urbanisation pathways. Local participatory governance is considered key in doing so. Drawing on empirical evidence from participatory action research in Bogotá, Colombia, we examine efforts to improve the governance of community gardens through the creation of new participatory artefacts in the form of community indicators. Employing an assemblage lens, we explore how community indicators support community agency for urban sustainability by helping to embed an existing action plan within place-specific issues, actions and role-responsibilities. This social embeddedness is as significant as institutional embeddedness, highlighting the value of participatory artefacts as a form of grassroot democratic innovation. The paper contributes to understandings of participatory governance by foregrounding how community-developed indicators embed new capacities and tools within existing participatory assemblages in marginalised neighbourhood contexts.