Katrin Hofer
2025
Full text
This publication explores how residents of Bramfischerville, an underprivileged area in Johannesburg, South Africa, understand public participation in urban development. The study reveals that for many community members, participation is less about influencing policy and more about gaining recognition and fostering relationships. These locally grounded perspectives challenge dominant theories of participation as a state-led process.
Public participation is widely seen as a cornerstone of democratic urban governance. Globally, governments and planners have adopted participatory approaches to involve residents in shaping their cities. Yet academic and policy debates often continue to frame participation as a top-down mechanism, where citizens are invited to contribute within structured formats aimed at improving plans and policies. These approaches tend to emphasize institutional design and technical outcomes, while paying limited attention to how participation is actually experienced by those it seeks to empower.
This article addresses this gap through an in-depth case study of Bramfischerville. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork—including group interviews, a survey of 502 residents, and interviews with government officials and community leaders—the research examines how ordinary urban residents conceptualize participation. The findings point to culturally and contextually embedded understandings that contest conventional models. Instead of viewing participation as a top-down, state-driven process, the study calls for a reimagining rooted in situated knowledge and lived experience.
Divergence in understanding emerges along three key dimensions: the why, who, and how of participation. These insights are summarized in the table below.
While the study is situated in Johannesburg, its implications extend globally. It speaks to a broader challenge: how to make participation genuinely meaningful. The research suggests that participation should not be approached as a technical fix, but as a relational and context-sensitive practice. It must be shaped by local knowledge, sustained through dialogue, and built on shared responsibility.
These findings invite reflection across diverse settings and advocate for participatory spaces to be co-designed through negotiation among all involved actors. Such an approach would help embed more inclusive and nuanced understandings of participation into urban governance.
In: Sage Journals, 29 September 2025 (online)