How democracy is forcing itself onto the global urban agenda
If the question of identity has emerged so strongly in urban planning this year, it is because it reflects the need for a major overhaul of how the wider public participates in the formation of the city. What emerges from this surprisingly insistent question of identity is a democratic agenda: how to listen to the people, since the people obviously refuse to go unheard.
This is the larger theme that emerges from these analyses: how to manage and improve our cities without cutting across the grain of them. How do we repair the disruption and displacement caused by development, how do we strengthen the rights and recognise the contributions of all communities, how do we reorganise what we have rather than destroy it through reinvention, and how do we do all of this while being who we want to be, individually and collectively? In 2013, how will we learn to accept that the people of our cities are the solution, not simply another factor to be managed?
Reading Development 