Citizen participation at the metropolitan level: new experiences for old results?

The local level is the favorite scale for the implementation of citizen participation. Among all the subjects, urbanism has been one of the fields where it has developed the most. However, little research has been done at a metropolitan scale, that is, an analysis of citizen participation in multiple municipalities belonging to an urban agglomeration. The main purpose of this article is to know if the realisation of a participatory process in a metropolitan area has some specificities that enable us to differentiate it from a process at a local scale. To answer the question, we will use a case study methodology, analysing the participatory process of the Urban Director Plan of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. The results of the study indicate that in general, this process has reproduced the main gaps found in citizen participation processes at the local level, mainly gender imbalance. However, we have found that there is a higher participation of individual citizens, compared to that of associations, groups and platforms.