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Public participation in metropolitan conflicts
– a case study from Hamburg

Peter Henning Feindt
Universität Hamburg, Forschungsschwerpunkt Biotechnik, Gesellschaft und Umwelt, Ohnhorststrasse 18, D- 22609 Hamburg, E-Mail: phfeindt@botanik.uni-hamburg.de

Inner urban development in ‘global cities’ is frequently marked by conflicts between ‘metropolitan’ interests in providing central functions on the one hand, and interests of the local communities on the other. This paper argues that even in highly complex issues a deliberative public participatory process can be a powerful instrument to clear interests and facts and find more reconciling solutions. A case study from Hamburg shows how a potentially violent conflict could be framed as a common problem of the urban civil society. Nevertheless, limits to participation as a means for conflict resolution arise from the problem that participatory elements have to be integrated into a representative democratic system and existing power structures.

1. Metropolitan conflicts

Before analysing the potential role of public participation in metropolitan conflicts, the latter term - 'metropolitan conflict' - has to be explained. Two different meanings are implied.

First, in the context of national and international division of labour, metropolitan areas serve specific functions as centres of e.g. production, commerce and/or culture. The respective activities are embedded into a network of translocal social interactions and material flows. At the same time, the places where these activities take place are located in local neighbourhoods which they might affect (and vice versa) - either positively or negatively. Conflicts will probably arise if impacts are perceived as unbalanced by certain actors.

Second, the society of a metropolis - at least this is the case in Hamburg - typically is internally subdivided in several ways. On the one hand, as a result of the process of functional differentiation (Rueschemeyer 1974; Luhmann 1977; Tyrell 1978; Mayntz et al. 1988; Schimank 1996), a whole range of functionally oriented institutions and organisations look for specific aspects of the societal development process, e.g. business, traffic or education (Abbott 1988). Incidentally, these institutions and organisations are partly governmental, partly quasi governmental, partly non-governmental. On the other hand, urban societies offer more niches for cultural diversity. Last but not least, processes of segregation may result in income disparities between neighbourhoods and may lead to area based differences in interest and culture.

As a shortened form the two bundles of problems may be termed as 'global citiy' and 'pluralistic, functionally divided and socially segregated society'. Urban planning as a public activity has then to balance local and translocal aspects of development, a multitude of functional aspects, cultural diversity and social disparities (cf. Young 1997).

From the point of view of a political scientist, one of the most striking features of urban planning is the intentional allocation of urban space to private or to public utilisation. Drawing the line between the public and the private is certainly one of the outstanding public affairs, potentially involving bitter conflict between different monetary and non-monetary interests as well as between different ideological positions.

Moreover, there are two different meanings of public - the public of civil society and public discourse, and the public interest as a guideline for the work of public administrations. The meaning of private splits up into a multitude of particularistic logics of collective action, e.g. the logic of the market, of religious communities, or the logic of family, neighbourhood or peer group solidarity (cf. Walzer 1983).

2. Three modes of conflict resolution

In most western countries there is a multitude of mechanisms to resolve public conflict. In a nutshell, three modes of democratic legitimacy can be distinguished: representative democracy, direct democracy, and cooperative democracy (cf. Bogumil 2000).
– The mode of representative democracy is the dominating one in most western countries’ urban politics. Typically, with regard to urban planning, development activities have to be supervised and approved by the local authorities and specifically a by local planning authority. These bureaucratic institutions are responsible to the city parliament which is elected by those parts of the town’s population that holds the right to vote.
– In some places, as is the case in the city of Hamburg, citizens in addition have the right to initiate a referendum on single topics. The outcome binds authorities for a number of years – depending on the issue – and cannot be overruled by the city council nor by the city parliament. Therefore, direct democratic institutions provide a second mode of legitimacy. In the case of a successful initiative, they also generate veto positions in the process of bargaining over public policies or planning issues.
– In recent years, a third mode of legitimacy gains weight and attention that might be called cooperative democracy. Cooperative democracy is a term to summarise a whole range of activities mainly undertaken by town councils to involve citizens in the process of policy formulation and implementation, in which interested citizens can take the role of co-planners and co-organisers respectively (Bogumil 2001: 5f.). In the context of this paper, only the former part of cooperative democracy – involving citizens as co-planners – is of interest. Alluding to the theory of deliberative democracy (e.g. Bohman/Rehg 1997, Elster 1998; Dryzek 2000), the arenas of cooperative democracy may be termed deliberative procedures, indicating that participants are expected to exchange arguments, even if they are prepared to bargain for their interests (cf. Elster 1998a).
Since the nineteen-sixties, the call for participation in urban planning has been widespread. As a result, in Germany as well as in other European countries, information, hearing and consultation rights have been implemented. Cooperative democracy builds on the rights achieved during the former waves of enlargement of participation (Selle 1996). But in contrast, cooperative democracy is not mandatory but driven by the intention to mobilise resources and intelligence, to generate legitimacy, and to prevent conflict.

The distinctive policy style (cf. Inglehart 1977; Scharpf 1989) of cooperative democracy harmonises with those approaches to urban planning that conceive planning as a public activity. In recent years, not only planners but also architects like Daniel Libeskind consider public debate on their proposals as an important part of their project. From a legitimacy and conflict resolution perspective, the quality of such debates on planning issues is of vital importance. Planners like John Forester (1985) have drawn on the works of Juergen Habermas (e.g. 1996) to introduce a concept of analysis that associates specific conditions of communication – focussed on the concept of a power free discourse as a position of reference – with communicative quality. Communicative quality again is conceptualised as the ability of every participant to make or question statements on facts, norms and feelings without restrictions on time, issues and participants. The result of such a discourse can be presumed to have reconciled all relevant interests. Real communication in contrast usually is limited in time, issues and participants. Thus, efforts to resolve conflicts in urban planning by offering a cooperative or deliberative procedure have to be able to justify the specific restrictions.

For this end, a large variety of models for deliberative citizen participation have been developed, proposed and tested, e.g. environmental mediation (Amy 1987; Susskind/Cruikshank 1987; Baughman 1995; Dukes 1997), citizen juries (Coote at al. 1993; Armour 1995) and planning cells (Dienel 1992). While all these models arrange specific conditions of communication that facilitate public debate in order to clear interests and cooperatively to find facts, they differ widely in the mode of selection and invitation of participants, the role of participants during the process, and the type of results they generate. The main difference regards how to deal with the inevitable existence of conflicts. Three strategies can be discerned taking the mode of invitation as a staring point:

A first group of procedures offensively opens up the process of bargaining and arguing for everyone that is interested. Participants find themselves in the role of volunteers. Groups that are weakly organised or lack even the ability to articulate their interests might be particularly activated by a process manager.

A second strategy aims at the integration of all groups affected by the issue. A neutral third party is responsible for identifying and inviting representatives and for levelling the playing field during the process if necessary. Participants take part in the process as representatives of certain groups, certain sorts of interests or certain (e.g. professional) perspectives on the topic.

A third strategy is to ‘neutralise’ particular interests by random invitation. Participants then represent a statistical entity.

In the three types of process the participants represent different kinds of constituencies. Thus, their statements as well as the results have got a different social meaning and a different force to bind non-participants:

• If participants are chosen by random, their statements have got a status comparable to opinion polls, although the deliberative mode of data generation allows the conclusion that the result might reflect what the position of a well informed public opinion might be (Fishkin 1995, 1996).
• Volunteers only speak for themselves, and generalisations from a volunteer sample should be drawn only very carefully. Volunteer meetings are most appropriate if the purpose is to develop and implement a joint project.
• Representatives are expected to speak for their respective constituencies. If this expectation is justified, in case of an agreement the results have the status of a political compromise among the represented groups.

Case studies have shown that deliberative arrangements – if well organised and facilitated – regularly produce high quality results, i.e. a consensus by all concerned groups on what to do or on criteria, or a well-documented disagrreement as a basis for rational and well-informed decision-making. The answer to the question if an agreement can be reached, mainly depends on the contextual interests and the sort of conflicts involved. Nevertheless, getting the results taken into account within the established decision process, turned out to be the crunch. Although the way deliberative procedures work – giving reasons – is suitable to generate what might be called ‘deliberative legitimacy’, often the agreement still has to be implemented by public administrations or needs to be approved by the city parliament in order to provide formal legitimacy.

Thus, the impact of a deliberative procedure depends on how it is embedded into the existing institutional framework to accommodate both the specific constellation of forces and interests and the possible need for a later approval by the authorities. This might be a major reason why there still is no thing like a theory of cooperative democracy, but only a frame of analysis and a number of case studies.

3. Case study: Expansion of the Hamburg exhibition centre

The function of a trade fair is to be "instrument of the market and of market research (...), stage for inventory and turntable for knowledge and know-how traffic, centre for information, contact and business interests" (I'RW 1999: 4, my translation). Depending on the specific market addressed, trade fair events are important nodal points in the network of regional, national or global business. Therefore, exhibition centres belong to that part of a city's infrastructure that serves central functions. As such, their functional, material, constructive and spacial structure is oriented towards the 'inner logic' of the trade fair business. Thus, from the perspective of their neighbourhood, trade fair areas appear as enclaves. (Breckner et al. 2000: 8).

For their functionality exhibition centres make great demands on their environment's traffic infrastructure and the disposibility of space. If an exhibition centre is located in an inner urban area, particular problems emerge from high density, out of date constructions, few development opportunities, few space for parking and the storage of heavy goods vehicles, no or few green areas, and remarkable strain on the urban environment during periods of major events especially caused by traffic and noise (Breckner et al. 2000: 9).

Thus, there were plenty of reasons why in 1998 the government of the city state of Hamburg - the senate - commissioned an investigation to find out if there are possible areas where to rebuild the city owned exhibition centre at the town's outskirts. The senate as well as the management were afraid that the exhibition centre would lose competitiveness in the face of major modernisation efforts undertaken by their German competitors. Exhibition halls in Hamburg partly date from the 1950's, the latest three halls have been opened in 1984. Infrastructure for delivery is poor, costs time and money and puts strain on the surrounding street system which is used as storage space for dozens of heavy weight vehicles.

The examination of three alternative sites in Hamburg brought negative results. The reconstruction would take too much time or money, said the senate's department of trade and commerce (Klein 2000). Therefore, in December 1999, the senate informed the Buergerschaft (the city-state's parliament) that they wanted to examine within one year if and under what circumstances the exhibition centre could be modernised and expanded at its present inner urban location. This project would be one of the largest contemporary inner urban planning projects in Germany.

Trouble started immediately. Attached to the senate's information to the parliament is a scheme authored by the internationally renowned architect Professor Maag, which shows that major parts of the Fleischgrossmarkt Hamburg ('beef wholesale market') should be used for the exhibition centre's expansion. The management of the Fleischgrossmarkt complained that they never had been talked to and therefore refused to give away but one square metre. The senate's department of trade and commerce held the position that the area of the Fleischgrossmarkt is owned by the city. In fact, the current rental contract is limited until 2022, but can be restricted until 2012 by the city in 2002.

At this point of time, there were more than 170 companies located on the Fleischgrossmarkt area, with an annual turnover of ca. 850 Mio Euro. They counted roundabout 2.700 employees and indirectly gave work to additional 1.300 persons. All figures were steadily increasing in the course of the year 2000. Half of the 4.000 persons of workforce lived not further away than five kilometres. Many of them were dependant on their employers' staying in town because working hours in the beef industry are typically at night when there is no or few public transportation, while mostly low incomes do not allow the expenses necessary to hold a private car. Moreover, 60 per cent of the Fleischgrossmarkt employees have no or few skills and therefore they face few alternatives on the regional job market. In January 2000, the Fleischgrossmarkt management started to organise political resistance against the senate's plans.

But there were more reasons why remarkable resistance formed up in the three surrounding quarters which are characterised by very high density, intense mixture of living and working and high urban quality. Inhabitants, local business and traders criticised that the senate wanted to use large amounts of inner urban fallow land - the former sites of a coal power plant and a goods depot - without any consideration of alternative development models, especially for mixed housing and small and medium scale business. Besides, protesters were afraid of additional traffic strain and further impulses to increase the value of real estate and increasing rents that would drive traditional business and poorer inhabitants out of the quarter.

In spring 2000, two information events were organised by the S.T.E.G. (city development society) - a city owned development agency that holds major parts of real estate in the three adjacent quarters. They also administrate three local redevelopment councils in the three quarters. These councils had been founded during the 1980's in the course of major city driven redevelopment programs in each of the three quarters. Members are representatives of a range of local business and citizen initiatives.

The two information events - featuring high representatives from the senate's trade and commerce as well as the urban development department and the exhibition centre's chief executive - were well attended with up to 150 visitors. Both events ended up in bitter quarrels, insultations and threats that there would be decisive resistance and possible violence.

On 1st May 2000 an all night street fight between the police and members of the 'autonomous scene' took place around the 'autonomous cultural centre' "Rote Flora" ('Red Flora'), which is located in the middle of one of the three quarters adjacent to the exhibition centre's expansion area. Although the exhibition centre was not the issue of the upsurge, members of the senate were afraid that the expansion might become a symbol of capitalist globalisation and the target of further violence. Thus, the department of trade and commerce and the department of urban development wanted to offer thorough dialogue to the representatives and inhabitants of the quarters in order to find a way how to secure their interests in the planning process and convince them that the senate really does so.

On 9th June 2000 the two departments engaged political scientists Professor Wolfgang Gessenharter and Dr. Peter H. Feindt to organise a "communicative accompaniment of the planning process for the Hamburg exhibition centre's modernisation". The declared purpose was to focus the communication related to the planning process, to structure the themes and issues, and to create communicative structures in the sense that at any time the results of the more encompassing discussions are saved so that they can be challenged only by giving good reasons. The aim of the process was to achieve a 'contract', i.e. an agreement on the essential features of the following architectural competition (Feindt/Gessenharter 2000: 4).

The process consisted of a pre-phase and two main phases.

During the pre-phase, in June and July 2000, ca. 20 background talks and in-depth interviews were held with key players from politics, administration, business and neighbourhood initiatives.

The goal of the first phase was to collect, structure and prioritise the matters of concern. As a start, on 8th July 2000 an eight hour long workshop was held in one of the fair pavilions. Roundabout 100 representatives from the three quarters were personally invited, comprising 85 members of the redevelopment councils and 15 citizens that had declared their interest by having their name put down in a list at the second information event mentioned above. Almost half of them showed up, mostly all day. They met 20 members of the different administrative agencies engaged on the planning process and 15 expert witnesses hired by the city and the exhibition centre's management.

The day started with detailed clarification of roles and mandates. A top representative from the senate's department of urban development presented the state of the planning process and faced a two and a half hour discussion. Later, participants examined expert witnesses on the scope of their tasks, on their premises, methods and provisional results. Finally, they formulated a judgement on the state of the planning process and recommendations to the planners. As a result of the day, more than 20 points were added to the expert witnesses' tasks. Implicitly, the expert witnesses were accepted as trustworthy on the condition that they would take into account the additional questions raised by the quarters‘ representatives. The issue of letting the quarters hire their own expert witnesses was avoided. The communication process was established as cooperative fact finding, as contrasted by a model of expertise and counter-expertise. Nevertheless, the senate's department of urban development decided to pay for a traffic expert that helped the three redevelopment councils to understand the complex issues.

The first workshop followed the first of the three models of participation where participants take part as representatives of their quarters and the different organised groups therein, although the inclusion of the 15 citizens that had declared their interest just by having their name put down in a list adds an element of the volunteer participation model.

In the course of the project it soon turned out that time would be a critical factor. Since the senate had announced that they wanted to inform the parliament before the turn of the year, it appeared necessary to finish the participation process in October. While the business actors had strong bargaining positions and internally homogenous interests and the senate could rely on hierarchical decision structures, the three quarters as represented by their redevelopment councils were faced with partly conflicting interests and had to rely on time-consuming consensus building in order not to be divided and marginalised. Therefore, the process management offered to prepare and facilitate two additional meetings of all three redevelopment councils in September during which criteria and requirements on the planning process were formulated and priorities were set.

Since the goal of the whole process was to open up opportunities for everyone to get information, to discuss with the expert witnesses and the responsible persons, to raise questions and to articulate concerns, two citizen workshops were offered in July. Information was given three and five weeks in advance by direct-mail advertising to 7.000 households in the three quarters. Due to a lack of resonance, the first workshop had to be cancelled. A third workshop was offered instead in September by a renewed direct-mail advertising.

Finally, two citizen workshops of eight hours each took place in late July and late September 2000 with 17 respectively 25 participants from the three quarters. At the first citizens' workshop, two representatives from the senate's departments of trade and commerce and of urban development presented the premises and the state of the planning process. At the second citizens' workshop, the exhibition centre's executive chair explained why his company needed modernisation and expansion, and debated the company's perspectives at the inner urban location. Again, the state of the planning process was thoroughly discussed. At the end of both citizens' workshops, a detailed citizens' vote was documented by asking every participant about their three most important points he or she wanted to be done or not to be done. According to the feedback, both citizens' workshops were perceived by the participants as informative and trust-building.

In order to offer additional participation opportunities for everyone a citizens' hotline including an answering machine during out of office hours and a fax machine were provided. To make the process more transparent, all experts' reports and the protocols of all the workshops were displayed , on a particular website (www.messe-hamburg-dialog.de), where there was also a forum for discussion, a list of important addresses and links to all the organisations and initiatives involved in the process. The hotline was mainly used for organisational questions and informational purposes, the website for informational purposes. The forum received less than ten messages. A couple of citizens sent personal e-mails to the project team.

In sum, the participation opportunities for everyone activated roundabout forty persons that had not been involved through personal invitation to the first workshop. The organisers had expected to activate up to one hundred additional participants. Several reasons for this gap between expectation and outcome might be considered. First, large parts of the potential for active participation might have been exhausted by the participants in the first workshop. Second, major groups in the quarters - namely the migrant population - were not reached because of language barriers. Third, for specific groups, e.g. single parents, it is difficult to organise a whole day of leave for political discussion. Fourth, the deliberative format of participation does not attract all groups equally. Fifth, despite of several waves of information, the exhibition centre might not be a major issue for the population in the three surrounding quarters. Sixth, the population already felt well represented in the process and waited to be mobilised by their spokespersons if necessary.

Mobilisation happened indeed when - opening the second phase - the experts' reports were presented on a public hearing on October 12th. More than 100 participants, two regional TV and several radio stations as well as reporters from a number of local and regional newspapers attended the event. During a ten minute TV live coverage a dozen of black clothed persons entered the room and showed banners alluding to the violent Hafenstrasse conflict. But they left soon after the cameras were switched off and they had eaten all the buttered pretzels provided for free at the back of the room.

At the beginning of the meeting, the spokespersons of the most influential local citizen initiative questioned the openness of the process because of a talk that the main representative of the senate's department for urban development had given two days before. Although during the afternoon the initiative had already informed the press that they would boycott the process, the initiative could be convinced that they had misunderstood the talk. They agreed to stay in the process on the condition that they would be given the time they needed to study all the expert's reports. After this debate on the terms of the process, the expert's report on the Fleischgrossmarkt was presented. All the figures that had been presented by the management and had been doubted by the city, were confirmed by the expert witness. The latter also presented several proposals how the companies at the Fleischgrossmarkt could be compensated for loss of space that was needed for the exhibition centre's expansion. Since these compensations would afford several companies to move to a nearby area, members of the Fleischgrossmarkt's advisory board, the management and several owners of affected companies heavily agitated against the proposal and the person of the expert witness. Since this issue was crucial to the bare possibility of the exhibitions centre's expansion, the Fleischgrossmarkt forced the senate's representatives into a heavy and detailed debate. As a result, only one more expert's report could be presented that day.

Therefore, the first of two 'contract workshops' on October 14th was opened up to the general public and was used to discuss the remaining four expert's reports. Still, more than fourty representatives from the adjacent quarters took part, among them spokespersons of all key players. The turning point happened when participants noticed that the expert witnesses for environmental emissions and noise, for urban planning, for green area planning and for the social and economic impacts took up the local concerns, formulated social and ecological standards and offered planning options that would take into account the three quarters' interests.

During the following week, something happened that no one had expected. Three spokespersons from the most sceptical citizen initiative - the VerkehrsIni Karo4tel - formulated a 25 pages consensus paper.

The senate's representatives agreed to accept this paper as the basis for the second contract workshop on 29th October 2000. Again, more than forty representatives from the three quarters joined the eight hours of discussion. In the course of that day, more than 70 detailed statements from the initiative's paper, regarding all facets of the planning process, were asked for approval by the different local groups, the exhibition centre's management, and the senate's representatives. As a result, apart from traffic issues - which are characterised by divided interests in the quarters themselves between car owners and business people on the one side and families and environmental activists on the other - an operational consensus on most issues was found that was later termed the 'contract'. It was an important element of the contract that all parties agreed that the participation process should be continued. After that, the remaining planning options were commonly evaluated. Finally, a citizens' vote was documented.

In sum, the communication process helped to clear interests, to find facts in a cooperative way, to foster mutual understanding, and to build up trust between some of the senate's delegates, the business actors and the groups and initiatives in the three affected quarters.

Nonetheless, consensus and trust remained fragile. Early in December 2000, the exhibition centre, the city and the Fleischgrossmarkt reached an agreement based on the expert witness's concept. According to the deal, the Fleischgrossmarkt will give up fewer parts than the exhibition centre originally found necessary. The affected companies will move to new buildings on an adjacent area. All costs are paid for by the exhibition centre, that is in effectively by its owner, the city of Hamburg. Representatives of the three quarters complained that they have had no access to the negotiations, and suspected that their interests were not paid adequate attention to.

On 9th January 2001 the compromise was presented to the public on a hearing at a school hall located in the most affected one of the three quarters. When the high rank representative from the senate's department of trade and commerce announced that there would be held further "information events", he was fiercely criticised for breaking the 'contract'. In order to restore trust he had to write a letter to one of the regional newspapers in which he regretted his utterance and stated that his department was interested in the continuation of an "efficient and effective citizen participation" (Klein 2001). This statement was also attached to the protocol of the January event.

4. Evaluation of the process

What are the criteria to evaluate a policy dialogue like the one presented above?

Building on an extended discussion and referring to the work of Juergen Habermas, Renn and Webler (1995, 1997) propose eight criteria. First of all, fairness in the sense that everyone who feels affected has got equal opportunity to participate and that participants have equal rights and duties might be considered as common sense. Second, participants should be competent with regard to the issue but also with regard to their ability to state their point of view and to question other participants' statements. Third, legitimacy affords both a justification of the mode of participants' selection as well as a clear and transparent integration into legally binding decision procedures. Fourth, internal efficiency demands effective communication during the process, and external efficiency is measured by relating the costs of the process to the opportunity costs.

Table 1 presents both an overview over the criteria and how they have been met in the case study.

Table 1: Evaluation of the Communicative accompaniment of the Hamburg exhibition centre expansion planning process

Criteria in column 1 to 3 from Renn/Webler 1997: 67.

Criterion

Purpose

Operationalisation

Hamburg exhibition centre

Fairness

Structural

Equal chance to participation for all persons affected

1^st priority: random selection

-

2nd priority: volunteers

+
Citizens' workshops, citizens at other workshops, and the public meetings of the redevelopment councils

3^rd priority: representation

+
Interviews: key players
Workshops: members of the local redevelopment councils, senate's representatives, affected business representatives

Process

Equal rights and duties to all participants

Concensually agreed rules of conversation

+
Facilitator made sure that every participant agreed on communicative and procedural rules.

Group is autonomous with regard to mandate, agenda, facilitation etc.

+/-
Facilitator and mandate defined by the senate.
Mandate repeatedly negotiated.
Autonomy on agenda.

Criterion

Purpose

Operationalisation

Hamburg exhibition centre

Competence

Factual

Minimising post-decisional regret

Systemic knowledge, e.g. by experts' delphi

+
In-depth interviews.
Workshops: repeated discussion of experts' reports.

Anecdotal knowledge by verification

+
Participants raise questions for experts' reports, discuss and control results.

Communicative

Equal chance for every participant to make and criticise statements and declarations.

Concensually agreed rules of proof for cognitive, normative and expressive statements.

+
Implicitly contained in common rules of conversation; reminded at if necessary.

Support by facilitator

+
All the time.

Legitimacy

Formal

Justification of participants' selection

Selection process with equal chance to participate: random selection, volunteering

+
Citizens' workshops: direct-mail advertising to all households in the adjacent quarters; among them volunteering;
Public meetings of the redevelopment councils: volunteers;
Workshops: interested citizens (having let their name put on a list) as volunteers

Comprehensible key of representation

+
Interviews: restriction to key players due to lack of time.
Meetings of the redevelopment councils: members.
Workshops: members of the redevelopment councils, authorities, affected business companies, redevelopment agency

Integrative

Integration into legally binding decision process

Clear political mandate

+
Commission for the process by the senate's departments of trade and commerce and urban development: to focus the communication processes related to the planning process, to structure the themes and issues, to create communicative structures; to build consensus on essential features of the planning process, if possible.

Criterion

Purpose

Operationalisation

Hamburg exhibition centre

Establishing a priori how the results will be handled

+
Final report of the project has the formal status of an expert's report according to German planning law (Baugesetzbuch) and thus has to be considered in the process of choice between conflicting goods.

Commitment of politicians (here: the senate) to publicly justify any deviation from recommendations

+
See above. The senate has to give reasons for their decision in relation to the experts' results.

Efficiency

Internal

Time consumed in reasonable proportion to results

Obeyance of rules of conversation

+
Partly challenged.

Decision analytical techniques used

+/-
Decision tree for single planning options

External

Expenditures and energy consumed in reasonable proportion to results

x per cent of total expenditures

+
Ca. 0,03 % of expenditures for exhibitions centre's modernisation as estimated in the senate's information to the parliament.

x per cent of maximum post decisional regret

+
Failure of agreement with the Fleischgrossmarkt would have stopped the project.

Comparison with conflict costs avoided

+
Until 1 April 2001 no violent protests and no lawsuit.

5. Concluding remarks

The results from the case study allow four careful conclusions.

1. The planning process for the expansion of the Hamburg exhibition centre at its present inner urban location shows all the features of what in this paper has been called a 'metropolitan conflict'. The participation process was able to address the four different types of conflict:

a) The city government wanted to provide an infrastructure for central functions by which the local urban environment is negatively affected. In the course of the process solutions were found how these functions could be fulfilled without aggravating the situation for the adjacent neighbourhoods. Particularly, the social, economic and urban development embedding of the exhibition centre into the quarters was the main issue.

b) The plurality of functional aspects was brought into the process by the expert witnesses and the specialised departments of the city government. In addition to a classical planning process, the lay perspective was strengthened.

c) Cultural and ideological diversity was partly integrated. A broad spectrum of political positions was articulated. But only few members of the migrant population joined the discussions.

d) Processes of social segregation and income disparities were an important issue raised by many participants. One of the experts' reports was focussed on finding data and generating ideas how the local economy could win from the exhibition centre's modernisation and how low income households could be protected from increasing rents. Though, participants mainly had a middle class and academic background and raised these issues more or less as advocates.

2. The case study shows that in highly complex planning processes it is possible to establish a participation process that fulfils the process criteria of fairness, competence, legitimacy and efficiency. Nonetheless, from the point of view of participatory democracy (e.g. Barber 1984) the quantitative participation could be improved.

3. The thesis that participation decreases the quality of the planning results - widespread among experts - cannot be supported. In the social dimension, the results have been agreed on as a basis for the following planning process by all relevant groups. In the material dimension, the results are encompassing. It is remarkable that the final consensus paper was authored by a local citizen initiative. In the time dimension, the participation process did not prolong the senate's process of weighing up the different aspects and bargaining over the costs. To the contrary, the continuous requirement to explain their position might have speeded up the decision making process in the senate's departments.

4. The communication and participation process can be considered as a good example of cooperative democracy. Articulated groups as well as interested individuals were invited to discuss issues before the formal planning process had begun. Nevertheless, the dominating mode of decision making and conflict resolution in the political system is representative democracy. Thus, cooperative procedures will only be initiated and effective if incumbents hope to gain something.

a) In the case of the Hamburg exhibition centre, the surrounding quarters are strongholds of the Green Party (40 % of votes as compared to a total of 13,9 % in the 1997 Hamburg elections) which forms a coalition with the Social Democrats. It is important that in 1999 five of their left wing parliamentarians left the Green Party and soon announced that they would compete for votes in the 2001 elections. During early 2000, this newly established "Rainbow" formation concentrated major parts of their public activities on the exhibition centre issue. Therefore, the red and green senate was interested in integrating the activists in the quarters.

b) After they had put enormous time pressure on the participation process to be finished in November 2000, until 1st April 2001 the senate has not informed the parliament about what options they prefer. Since elections will be held in September 2001, it appears probable that the issue will not be presented before that date. Although no citable information is available, one might assume that in the logic of partisan politics it seems more advantageous to influential members of the senate to hold back the results.

In sum, the state of the art in participation processes allows the conclusion that inner methodological problems are no insurmountable barrier to efficient and effective citizen participation even in highly complex issues. It is the social and political context that decides to what degree a participation process can have a real impact. If key players have better alternatives to a negotiated agreement, they will not join the process or will join it without making any serious concessions. In particular, if the results have to be implemented by players who are oriented towards their reelection, the logic of representative democracy and the established power relations might overrun any recommendation hammered out in a participation process. Still, in these cases the results of a deliberative and inclusive procedure can serve as a guideline to identify in what direction and for whose benefit power relations are effective.

References

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Amy, Douglas 1987: The Politics of Environmental Mediation, New York: Columbia University Press.

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