“Invited and uninvited public participation, and why both matter: Dutch lessons from the past

The European Faro Convention emphasizes the importance of public participation.
Processes of public participation influence the built environment, when citizens engage in heritage projects in their surroundings. Currently, participation in heritage involves an interaction of a government with an invited group of citizens. Participation practices emerged during the nineteen sixties and so far, have been difficult. Recent historic research provides insights in public participation in the built environment, yet these studies are limited to ‘invited’ forms of participation. In this paper, we propose that it is important to consider also
‘uninvited’ acts of civic engagement, and that examining historic Dutch cases adds
importantly to our knowledge of public participation.
Especially during the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, Dutch city officials were confronted with activist citizen groups. In reaction to city renewal plans, citizens protested the changes of their urban environment, often by intervening in their neighbourhoods. These protests and interventions provide important information about the values citizens assign to their environment. These ‘uninvited’ interactions, however, have never been interpreted as participation, even though true participation comes forth from autonomy.
In this paper, we study public participation in the built environment by analysing three historical Dutch cases from the 1970s of ‘invited’ and ‘uninvited’ public participation. Moreover, we address the lessons learned in relation to public participation in community heritage. In this study the ‘approval’ of government bodies is not be used as a criterium to distinguish between acts of official participation versus autonomous acts. The (un)invited forms of participation are not seen as unwanted interventions by unwarranted actors, but rather as indicators of citizen’s unfulfilled needs in which citizens try to signal or amend these needs.