Participatory Budgeting and PlacemakingConcepts, Methods, and Practices

Helen: A neighborhood in Lisbon. About three hundred residents show up to a meeting — not to vote for a councillor, not to sign a petition, but to decide what gets built on a derelict hillside. A garage was planned. They wanted a garden. And they had a new tool to fight for it. Adam: That tool is participatory budgeting — a process where a city sets aside part of its public spending and lets residents propose and vote on where it goes. It's a real slice of the budget, with real money attached. Helen: Smaniotto Costa and colleagues compared three cities: Lisbon, Warsaw, and Valencia, to ask what participatory budgeting actually delivers for public green spaces and urban democracy. There were two phases: first, they mapped each city's program through documents and existing research. Then, they conducted field visits to see what had changed on the ground. Adam: Walk me through Lisbon first. Helen: The Lisbon project is called Jardim do Caracol da Penha, or the Snail Garden of Penha. The Movimento pelo Jardim mapped the site's flora and fauna, ran design workshops with a volunteer landscape architect, and took the proposal to the city's participatory budget vote. It won with just under ten thousand votes, which was the largest in Lisbon's program at that point. Construction started in 2019. Adam: Nearly ten thousand votes for a local park. Helen: Warsaw's project, the Green Street Świętokrzyska, tells a similar story. The proposal won in two thousand sixteen with about two thousand votes. What was delivered includes one hundred and ninety-one plane trees, flower meadows, benches, and bicycle racks. The final cost came in at roughly ten times the original estimate, amounting to about one million euros. Adam: Ten times over budget. That's the detail I would focus on if I were skeptical about whether these programs actually deliver. Helen: It's a real tension that the paper doesn't resolve. Valencia's case is different. It involves a district-level Green Plan for the Poblats Marítims neighborhood, which is part of a broader climate strategy. Citizens proposed tree planting along all streets, community gardens, a seed bank, bird-watching routes, and even a solar cooker. Adam: Here's what I genuinely don't follow. The paper treats the social media campaigns and online voting as a core feature of why these projects work. But how is running a Facebook campaign for your neighbourhood garden meaningfully different from a popularity contest? Couldn't the loudest or most digitally connected voices simply win? Helen: The paper doesn't dismiss that. They acknowledge that moving participatory budgeting online can skew participation toward more digitally connected and often more affluent residents. They say that directly. Adam: So they're agreeing with me. Helen: Partly. Their argument is that in these three cases, social media expanded reach rather than narrowing it. The Lisbon movement used blogs and Facebook to gather supporters from across the city. Without that reach, ten thousand votes do not happen. Adam: That only follows if the people who voted were genuinely new participants and not just the same engaged minority clicking instead of walking. Helen: The paper doesn't have data to settle that, and they say so. What they do claim is that the digital layer was central to each program's reach. Lisbon has run the program twelve times since 2008. Warsaw has done so nine times. Valencia has run it seven times. That's sustained engagement, not a one-off. Adam: The repetition does change how I read it. One cycle you could explain away. Twelve editions means something kept working. Helen: Which brings us to what the paper argues is ultimately at stake: empowerment, connectivity, and co-creation. Residents gained real influence over their physical environment. Individual projects linked into wider networks of public space. The design process itself was shared between residents and city officials. Adam: I'll accept those claims for the three cases. The garden exists. The trees are planted. What I still want is the follow-up — do those gains hold once the vote is over and construction is complete? Helen: That's the paper's honest limitation. Smaniotto Costa and colleagues call directly for rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluation over time. The case that participatory budgeting can bridge government and residents has been made. Whether it stays bridged is still open. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.