Participation is a key factor for successful engagement of the public in different governance processes in urban planning, for example at community level or in infrastructure planning. While some planning/policy contexts include more sophisticated and matured mechanisms for participation, as in the UK, others are still lacking proper integration of the public opinion as a governance tool.

​

To overcome this detachment, local communities tend to organise into groups of interest which help them build capacity to intervene. This is particularly evident in Brazilian cities, where collective community groups, many called Coletivos, are taking an increasingly more important role in mobilising their local communities.

 

The Coletivos, which usually start with social or artistic agendas, have been spreading their activities into dealing with local community development issues like transport, public space or green infrastructure. They integrate activists with expertise in these fields, bringing more capacity to gain community momentum on the key issues.

 

The potential that these Coletivos have for improving decision-making in urban planning and infrastructure planning processes is high, in particular if they are more able to incorporate established methods in decision support into their innovative engagement practices. At the same time, after the intense public dissemination of the modelling and quantification done to support health policy decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic, there is arguably more literacy in these issues and an opportunity to make a push for a more effective use of decision support tools (e.g. indicators, models or GIS) in urban governance to qualify public debates.

 

Our project aims at investigating the extension to which these community groups incorporate knowledge in decision support methods/tools in their activities to improve their outcomes and to learn, from these groups’ practices, what could be improved in established decision support methods.