Urban participatory spaces. Participatory budgeting as a driver for the enforcement of the right to the city

Abstract

During the last decades, the debate around the reinterpretation of the concept of the right to the city (Lefebvre 1967) emphasized the necessity to rethink the notion of urban citizenship in an inclusive perspective in the processes of decision making that influence the production of space (Purcell 2002; Marcuse 2009). In this picture, Participatory Budgeting (PB) represented an important case of study due to its declared objective to give voice to inhabitants that are commonly excluded in local representative institutions (UN-Habitat 2004; Wampler 2012). Nonetheless critical literature highlighted the existence of visible and invisible barriers to participation, able to condition the inclusive capacity of the new urban participatory sphere created by PB. The integration of ICTs in PB management increased the complexity of the relation between these two kind of spaces (participatory space vs urban space).