Rethinking public participation in citymaking within a global southern context: the case of Amman, Jordan

In early 2011, when protests erupted in the Arab region, most people, whether locals or foreigners, were caught by surprise. Authoritarian rule and culture had always seemed deeply embedded in the region, and citizens appeared to have adapted their lives to this fact. The demand for the downfall of the regime targeted entrenched structures characterised by corruption and autocracy, limiting the people’s freedoms. Although the uprisings ultimately fell short of realising the aspirations and expectations of those involved, a number of manifestations of change in social, political and cultural life had emerged, calling for a profound rethinking of normative conceptualisations such as democracy, participation and liberty, in different socio-spatial aspects of the city. In the Jordanian context, which is the focus of this research, new grassroots activism aimed at creating novel spaces of participation in the production of the city emerged, creating new possibilities for alternative political ideas to surface beyond the formal confines of planning and development. In this light, this dissertation aims to understand the different approaches to public participation in citymaking in Amman and highlight the role of the emerging grassroots participatory approaches in shaping novel modes of engagement and existence within the confines of a restrictive political environment following the Arab Spring. These grassroots initiatives serve as countervailing forces against the authoritarian shaping of public participation and the production of urban spaces.

This dissertation and project complement this approach through empirical research and take a broader societal view to explore the conditions, inventive practices and values under which grassroots initiatives have contributed to promoting democratic change. Focusing on lived experiences of these initiatives in Amman city, the capital of Jordan, I devised a Southern, decolonial and collaborative approach relying on feminist thinking through relational and activist approaches to develop a perspective that questions the new sites of public participation in the authoritarian contexts of the Global South. While the characterisation of public participation as either ‘invited’, state-led participation or ‘invented’, grassroots sites of resistance and direct confrontations with the state may be useful, I argue that a third mode of public participation is apparent in authoritarian contexts of the Arab region. The grassroots often act in ways that could be characterised as confronting or insurgent but do not aim to challenge the state. Nor are they adequately explained as apolitical, passive and individualistic. Instead, however imperfectly, they use various ways to navigate and manipulate the planning rules and grids of the state apparatus to create alternative modes of engagement in citymaking within a fraught urban landscape. I label this mode existing between rebel resistance and acquiescence as ‘tactical’ participation. Thus, in a broader sense, this project develops a perspective that has the potential to expand theoretical categories and contribute to the evolving lexicon of an alternative mode of urbanisation, enriching urban studies with empirical and practical knowledge from geographies beyond the conventional focus.