In city development, most citizen participation takes place when there is already a project in development and a designer at work. The BMA wants to involve civil society more openly in the making of the city, and in particular upstream of the project design stage.

Organising competitions is our main tool. This enables citizens to be involved in a new project at an early stage. And there are no secrets in a competition! In fact, everyone is welcome. As part of the competition process, one could invite interested parties from civil society or the neighbourhood to come and observe how the jury works. The aim is to be totally transparent and to share the experience of the journey towards a well-founded decision. This is what we call a public jury.

Another more ambitious option is to include representatives of civil society on the advisory committee in the form of a citizens’ panel. Thanks to this participation, the citizens’ panel, like the other members of the committee, can ask questions, contribute to the debates and take part in the choice of the winning project. This approach strengthens the expertise of users within the advisory committee and gets citizens on board. On behalf of the BMA, we are strongly advocating that the presence of a citizens’ panel should be a systematic practice in all public space development competitions.

The involvement of citizens should not be limited to the competition itself. We support this opening up to civil society and the expertise of users being taken into account upstream of the competition. This involves a participatory process to define the programme of needs, and temporary use in the public space to test and prefigure desired and future uses.