Assembling neighbourhoods and beyond: multiple assemblages of participatory democracy

Participatory practices are conventionally seen by policy-makers and researchers as discrete, isolated actions or events involving independent individuals with pre-given ideas and identities. In this paper I propose that not only can they be better understood as assemblages in and of themselves, but also that diverse instances of participatory democracy might constitute parts of wider participatory assemblages. I start by considering one particular instance of participatory democracy, a form of community-led land use planning in England called ‘neighbourhood planning’. Introduced by the Localism Act 2011, neighbourhood planning gives communities the power to write their own statutory land-use policies. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from the state to pre-existing communities. I argue that it is better understood as an assemblage, with both the neighbourhood and the Neighbourhood Planning Group (NPG, the collective that leads the process) being assembled through the practices of neighbourhood planning to produce a new instantiation of ‘community’. I explore how new identities and capacities to act are generated through the specific sets of relations that are enacted in these practices. I suggest that in order to (provisionally) stabilise the new neighbourhood assemblage, NPGs must perform three conflicting identity relations with their sociomaterial neighbourhood, enacting themselves as a) wholly embedded within the neighbourhood as embodied synecdoche (the part standing in for the whole), b) distinct from but connected to the neighbourhood as reflexive mediator, and c) detached from the neighbourhood as remote expert. These identities are produced through the interaction of the NPG with a variety of human and non-human elements, such as residents, professionals, physical neighbourhood features, surveys, templates, funding mechanisms, policies, institutions, and plans. Each relational identity enacts the communities, issues and places of neighbourhood planning in different ways: each assembles the neighbourhood differently and enables different modes of knowing, valuing and representing it. NPGs have to hold these identities together in order to establish and maintain legitimacy as spokespersons for the neighbourhood (i.e. to stabilise the assemblage). But they also have to hold them apart to insulate them from the conflicts inherent amongst them, which threaten to destabilise the assemblage. I show how the emergent properties (e.g. agency) of the assemblage depend upon the relations between identities and the ways in which they assemble neighbourhood. I then go on to consider how instances of participation such as neighbourhood planning might be understood as parts of wider participatory assemblages, incorporating a wide range of undertakings from state-orchestrated / top-down processes to grassroots / bottom-up initiatives, and from activities focused on influencing public or corporate policy and decision-making to taking practical, local action. If identities and agency, knowledge and values are generated within sites of participatory democracy, how might they travel between sites? How might individuals, organisations, artefacts, texts, technologies etc generate relations between spatial or thematic networks of participatory democracy? And how might these relations be strengthened or undermined, thus strengthening, weakening and otherwise shaping wider dynamic assemblages of participatory democracy?