There are several methods that cities can employ to develop strategies towards decarbonization and renaturalization. But only some bring people to the forefront and very few can actually achieve early results.

PlanificAcción is the participatory method of urban and environmental planning that we recommend for cities aspiring to renew their strategic holistic plans. The Argentine cities of Buenos Aires and Catamarca are already implementing them, while other cities have previously developed these plans through the CIPPEC think-tank.

How does it work? The secret of the method consists of promoting social capital as the main objective of the planning process. First, the city's main stakeholders are identified, then the agenda of challenges is agreed upon and teams are assembled for the co-creation of strategic actions, which can be implemented during the plan's creation — and not at the end, as it is often the case in traditional planning processes.

These quick wins improve the levels of trust between participants and increase the levels of legitimacy of the overall planning process, as both citizens and politicians want to see visible changes and immediate results. It is a plan as a process, rather than a plan as a product, which helps the rapid and positive transformation of the urban space.

Origins

Until the late 1960s, city planning was part of a top-down model, with little room for public participation. As criticism of traditional methods grew, many scholars and community leaders began proposing a more central role of participation in urban planning policies (1). “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”, said Jane Jacobs in her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (2).

At around the same time, the city of Barcelona in Spain was moving forward with a comprehensive plan that aimed to coordinate the orderly participation of the public and private sectors in terms of urban development. Less than ten years after the first democratic elections at the city level following Franco’s dictatorship, Mayor Pasqual Maragall supported the drafting of the project’s guidelines, entitled The Economic and Social Development of Barcelona: the Strategic Plan in the Perspective of the Year 2000. These guidelines integrated citizen-oriented strategies for the first time in the history of Barcelona.

Participation was one of the key principles of the strategic plan. The goal? “To ensure the active representation of the largest number of agents of the city”. However, one of the constant obstacles was how to communicate it, “considering the intangibility of many of the aspects proposed by the Plan.” (4)

A unique model

In this context, PlanificAcción emerges as a mechanism for citizen co-creation that puts neighbors, public officials, academics and entrepreneurs to work collaboratively in a more horizontal fashion.

This is of great value for cities that adopt government plans that change course with each change of administration, where plans end up sitting in the experts’ desks and are never completely executed. Plans not consulted with the community are more likely to fail due to lack of consensus and ownership by civil society.

So how to break the cycle? The short answer: only if the plan is incorporated at every level of city leadership and consulted with the community, validated by both citizens and civil society actors.

The uniqueness of this solution is the way it combines planning with action from the very beginning of the process. The word “PlanificAccion” is a play on words in Spanish which summarizes the union of “planning” and “action”. The aim is to co-create strategic projects that can be implemented during the planning exercise. This way, the community can see a more immediate process that reflects the long-term thoughtful effort of planning with short-term actions that bring immediate solutions to everyday problems, which are highly valued by citizens and decision-makers.

The method includes a system of distribution of responsibilities between government areas (coordinating commission), NGOs (advisory commission), citizens (zonal commissions) and other governments of the metro area (metropolitan commission), which encourages participation and allows everyone to have a real ownership stake in the process.

It is worth noting that it is an open exercise. All meetings are recorded and shared on the website, so anyone can find out about the progress and add their proposals at any stage of the plan's development. The coming of the pandemic forced city councils to shift some of these in-person meetings to Zoom, but this unexpected challenge actually brought in more participation from people who did not usually take part in public hearings.

In Buenos Aires City, more than 1,000 proposals from citizens were taken into account to update the Urban Environmental Plan. In the northern provincial capital of Catamarca, 21 workshops with more than 380 participants resulted in 550 proposals on how to improve the different areas of the city. In the end, six projects were co-created with the neighbors of Catamarca, including a plan to revitalize the historic center and the creation of a linear park that would run along the riverbanks of the Fariñango stream.

Our take

This solution is ideal for medium- or large-sized cities who want to go carbon neutral and to renaturalize urban areas in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. We already helped several cities to implement this solution, which began in 2015 as a pilot project from the CIPPEC think-tank for the city of Bahía Blanca in central Argentina. Soon it was replicated in 5 Argentine cities (Córdoba, Mendoza, Resistencia, Catamarca and Puerto Madryn) with support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In 2020, it was officially adopted by two local governments: Buenos Aires, the country's capital with a population of 3 million, and the northern city of Catamarca, home to 170,000 inhabitants. If you want to know how we can help you implement this solution, please contact us and request more information.

References

1. Lane, M.B. (2005). “Public Participation in Planning: an intellectual history”, Australian Geographer No. 36 [link]

2. Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House

3. Baiocchi, G. (2003), “Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment” in Fung, A. and Olin Wright, E. (eds) Deepening Democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance, Verso [link]

4. Santacana, F. (2000). Strategic Planning, Aula Barcelona [link]

Hungry for more?

Lanfranchi, G. et al (2018). Una propuesta para el desarrollo urbano integral del Gran Catamarca, CIPPEC [link]

Lanfranchi, G. et at (2018). “Enhancing Climate Resilience Through Urban Infrastructure and Metropolitan Governance. Climate Action and Infrastructure for Development”, T20 Argentina, CARI-CIPPEC [link]

Lanfranchi, G. et al (2019). Estrategias de desarrollo integral para Gran Catamarca, CIPPEC [link]

Lanfranchi, G. (2020). “¿Puede la Covid-19 acelerar la unidad metropolitana del Gran Buenos Aires?”, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CEDOB) [link]

Trejo Nieto, A. and Niño Amézquita, J.L. (2021). Metropolitan Governance in Latin America, Routledge

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