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Ladder of Participation

Community participation came into the lexicon of urban planning in the 1960s, when local governments, in collaboration with the federal government and private developers, decimated entire neighbourhoods for the construction of freeways, hospitals and office buildings. As neighbourhoods threatened with such destruction began fighting back, academics also began criticizing the urban development models and theories that justified such top-down forms of development.

Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation was just one of the pieces critical of non-participatory forms of development, but her use of the ladder metaphor made her model easy to popularize. Her original article is reproduced in multiple locations on the Internet, and it has spawned many adaptations. This entry will review the historical context within which Arnstein's work was developed, describe the model itself and discuss issues related to the model and its influence within many different fields of practice.

The Historical Context

In the 1960s, the US economy was strong, and large cities were transforming themselves into dispersed metropolitan areas with multiple rings of suburbs. Federal urban policy supported this population dispersal by creating the infrastructure to propel the process, including the construction of freeways and suburban housing. These policies put into motion a process of uneven urban development, as higher income residents and jobs moved outside the city and the neighbourhoods were bulldozed for the construction of freeways to move suburbanites into and out of central city downtowns each workday. Governments made promises to redevelop disinvested urban neighbourhoods, but in practice, those promises often only went so far as to tear down deteriorated houses and commercial buildings. Local governments, sometimes by requirement of the federal government, also established forms of community input where residents could supposedly review and influence urban redevelopment plans. But the processes were actually organized to allow very little influence. Plans were often created in secret and then released through a public hearing process where residents could complain but could otherwise exert little influence to change the plans. While officially termed urban renewal, it was increasingly known by neighbourhood residents and social activists as ‘urban removal’ or ‘Negro removal’ as the neighbourhoods targeted by the process were primarily poor and African American.

As neighbourhoods across the country, populated by residents trained in civil rights and anti-war activism, organized to resist this urban removal process, academics began building a literature critiquing the top-down biases of these urban development processes. Among these critics was Arnstein, whose background included work in the health field, a non-profit research centre and the federal Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health, Education and Welfare.

The Ladder of Participation

Arnstein's article ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ was published in the July 1969 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners. The essay was part cutting critique of the accepted citizen participation models and part an elaboration of a model of true participation. Arnstein set out a high standard for citizen participation. For her, true citizen participation involved a redistribution of power, not simply having representation in the existing power structure. Too many attempts at citizen participation, in her judgement, were ritualistic and provided nothing to the participating citizens.

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