From visions of sharing power to building a culture of learning. Citizen participation in communication processes for development, in Malmö, Sweden

The City of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, has high ambitions when it comes to inclusion and participation from local businesses and universities, NGOs and citizens. The decision to democratize management and to change the city’s processes towards working on (more) equal terms with relevant actors, was made by the City Council in 2014 as a step towards a socially sustainable development. The City Planning Office of Malmö has the main responsibility for city developing projects. One of the city’s current developing projects is called Amiralsstaden, defined as a geographical area and a development process. The ambition of the project is to “through broad participation and co-creation, improve the city- and living environment and investigate how new housing and new businesses can be established” (malmo.se 2018: a) The project focuses on creating new ways of working with physical planning and to create new models for participation (Reflecting Paper 2018). Since 2017, Amiralsstaden has facilitated two different participatory communication processes for development. Communication for Development scholar, Linje Manyozo (2012:222), argues that development communication no longer is a question of relevant technology or local contexts, nor a question of top-down or bottom-up approaches. Instead, he says, it is a question of how power figures in the political economy of both development and communication. A key indicator of whether media and communication for development interventions have played a critical role in society should therefore revolve around an understanding of how power has been negotiated and contested in favour of people. With Amiralsstaden as case study, this thesis sets out to explore how the ambitions of participation on policy level translate into ‘real world’ city planning and what impact it has on development. More specifically, I want to know how citizen participation in communication processes for development is practiced, experienced and what these processes lead to in terms of results and outcome for the city and for the participants. The study is based on qualitative research methodologies, mainly in-depth interviews and observations. Concepts related to participation, such as power, voice, and representation, are in focus to analyse and understand participatory processes and how they contribute to city development