On 14 September 2026, visiting scholar Byeongsun Ahn (University of Vienna) will present his ongoing research on participatory planning, using a case of Vienna.
USI Lunch Seminar by Byeongsun Ahn
- Monday 14 September 2026, 12 - 2 p.m.
- UAntwerpen Stadscampus, room SJ.115
- Sint-Jacobsmarkt 13, 2000 Antwerpen
- A small lunch is provided
About the talk
Five reasons to consider participation seriously
Once considered a procedural instrument, participation is taking a more central role in contemporary planning practice through programs that emphasize civic engagement and education over direct planning outcomes. Increasingly, it involves a diverse range of non-planning experts and applies multiple, and different types, of participatory instruments across various stages of the planning process. This ongoing trend is redefining the roles and responsibilities of planners and reshaping their practical capacity to steer the planning process toward deliberative democracy and distributive justice.
New research agenda for participatory planning
This lunch seminar outlines a new research agenda for studying the complexity of participatory planning in its evolving form as it unfolds through distinct, yet interrelated, stages of the planning process, spanning from designing, participation, implementation, and maintenance to evaluation. By integrating the planning literature with policy capacity research, it identifies specific challenges within each of these stages that planners must navigate to simultaneously promote recognition, representation, and redistribution, alongside the corresponding capabilities (resources) and competences (skills) needed to overcome them.
Five key criticalities
This policy-oriented approach will highlight the full range of planning activities undertaken by diverse actors and institutions – planning and non-planning alike – and the context-bound interactions between their interests and ideas, shaping how procedural commitments may, or may not, produce substantive outcomes for distributive justice. To this end, it sets out five key criticalities to consider when researching and practicing participation:
- The politics of formulating design
- Techniques for using multiple instrument types
- Horizontal silos in implementing outputs
- External barriers to sustaining outcomes
- Methodological gaps in generating feedback
Further reading
To ground these theoretical arguments empirically, the seminar will introduce the case of Vienna’s participatory budgeting. The following publications offer further reading:
- Ahn, B. and Kazepov, Y. (2026). Rethinking Policy Learning in Urban Policy Mobility. Urban Studies, OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261456062
- Ahn, B. and Kazepov, Y. (2025). New Municipalism and the Challenges of Design: Context, Instruments and Implementation. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 116(4): 409-423. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12659
- Ahn, B., Friesenecker, M., Kazepov, Y., & Brandl, J. (2023). How Context Matters: Challenges of Localizing Participatory Budgeting for Climate Change Adaptation in Vienna. Urban Planning, 8(1): 399-413. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i1.6067