Research Information System
17th International Planning History Conference, Delft, Netherlands, 17 - 21 July 2016, vol.Vol 6, pp.215
This paper aims to discuss the historical background of today’s city councils, by examining the Çanakkale experience to pursue the roots of participative democracy at the local level. Drawing on the examples of local participation in Çanakkale during 90s, it is recognized that this approach of the municipality opened up new possibilities of enhancing the capacity of the local democracy. Çanakkale was one of the distinct examples of local participative administration during the early 90’s in Turkey for being the first experience of participative democracy at the local
level. The main tool for establishing a participative administration, the mayor of the city began organizing open public meetings. However, the
meetings were limited merely for the decision-making process. To overcome this limitation three new mechanisms come into use. These were opening a space for the locals to debate issues before the decision-making process; using public participation in the planning process of one of the central historical neighbourhoods’ of the city and lastly, carrying out the Local Agenda 21 to encourage public participation. So, this paper
investigates the construction of participative democracy at the local level in Turkey by examining these three mechanisms in detail and how do they shaped today’s mechanisms.
Keywords
public participation, participative democracy, collaborative planning, Local Agenda 21