A project on community participation

During the first two weeks of December, and for the third time, a group of ten students from Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada) and their professor Dr. Ajay Agarwal, stayed in Auroville. As part of their Masters in Urban and Regional Planning, the students designed a community participation framework for Auroville to be used for planning community projects. In collaboration with the Auroville Sustainability Institute and L’Avenir d’Auroville, they chose to focus their research on community participation in the planning and development of sectors one and two of the Residential Zone in Auroville (between Grace and Prarthana). The specific topic they tackled was to identify the need of “community features/supporting facilities” in these sectors. The goal was to design a clear guide for incorporating people’s views and opinions into the planning process in order to make it more inclusive and more informed.

How they designed the community participation framework

After doing extensive research in Canada on Auroville’s planning and development projects as well as on participation frameworks around the world, the students had to understand Auroville as well as possible to adapt their framework to the context. Therefore, before coming to Auroville, they sent a survey to Aurovilians about “perceptions about Community Participation” and conducted interviews on skype with Aurovilians in order to get a sense of how Auroville functioned and how participation was already happening. While in Auroville, they refined their community participation framework based on their new understanding of Auroville and the results of their pilot study on the need of “community feature/supporting facilities”.

They realized there was a wide spectrum of possibilities, called “levels of engagement”, in which the community could be involved. The higher the level of engagement, the more power the people have. At the highest level, the people have the decision-making power, at the lowest they are just informed.

The level of participation depends on the project and on the community. For example, in Auroville, the whole community does not need to have decision-making power each time the roads have to be fixed. Therefore, the students concluded that in Auroville, the planning and development should include a variety of levels of engagement. The community participation framework they proposed tried to reflect this understanding.

Pilot Study

The students designed their community participation framework while still in Canada. When they arrived in Auroville they conducted a pilot study by implementing a small portion of their framework. For this pilot study, they conducted more interviews with groups such as youth and individual Aurovilians, made site visits, sent another, more specific survey about community features/supporting facilities and organized several participatory activities with Aurovilians.

Their first activity was to conduct information kiosks and sound boards in PTDC, Solar Kitchen and the Creativity community to get ideas from Aurovilians on what they wanted as community features in the Residential Zone (more specifically in sectors one and two). Thanks to the information gathered in the kiosks, the group of students categorized the ideas in thirteen different themes. These themes were then presented in the Visioning Workshop the students organized. During the workshop, the Aurovilian participants) chose the most important themes among the thirteen, using the Dot Democracy method, and discussed each of the chosen themes in depth, using the Open Spaces method. The Dot Democracy method consists of giving the same number of dots to each participant who will then put one dot on each topic they think is one of the most important to talk about. The Open Spaces method allows participants to discuss topics in depth. To achieve this, several tables are set up and at each table a topic is discussed. When participants feel that they cannot contribute or learn more from the discussion, they go to another table and talk about another topic. Each table has a facilitator who tries to guide participants into choosing which projects would be the most important and the most feasible, how to implement them and in what time frame it would be possible to implement them.

Proposed framework

As they explained during their final presentation, the students designed a framework that would typically take from six months to one year and is composed of seven main steps:

The first step is to set intentions: define the purpose and the outcome of the participation process by clarifying the reason(s) to engage the community, the information wanted from this participation and the roles of the key players (decision makers, project team, community participants).

The second stage is a SWOC analysis. It consists of identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Challenges (SWOC) of participation processes in relation to the project, in order to identify the most suitable engagement technique for that project.

Step three is to identify the interested and impacted groups: their level of interest, how they are impacted, the needs/accessibility concerns and resources/skills.

The fourth stage is to choose the type of engagement: to tell, inform the community; to listen, include thoughts and feelings of community members; to discuss, create and share ideas; and to work together, to find a solution and make decisions.

The fifth stage is to choose the most appropriate participation techniques, depending on the project and the community.

Step six is to communicate and implement the plan. The organization informs the community of the final plan and implements it according to the timeline defined.

The last stage is to evaluate the process. The organization implementing the project has to collect feedback from the community and refine their project according to this feedback.

Through the activities and research they conducted in Auroville, the students learnt that the words they were using could have a different meaning for different people in Auroville so they tried to incorporate the spirit, wording and way of thinking of Auroville into their report. They also realized the importance of making information more accessible to people by, for example, communicating in different languages.

After spending time in Auroville, the students appreciated the spirit of experimentation in Auroville and the possibility to try different things that had not been tried before, says Joanna, one of the students. She explains that in Canada, for example, there are more regulations which prevent this freedom of experimenting. They also admired the willingness of Aurovilians to participate.