Involving Citizens through walking: Urban Walks as a tool for awareness raising in historic built areas

Abstract: Public participation in decision making is a hot topic for spatial planning for many decades. Since 2001, the Aarhus Convention is granting, among others, the public rights for public participation. However, as Arnstein already in 1969 wrote, there are many levels of participation and ever since the publication of her paper scholars as well as practitioners are deliberating various levels and a multitude of tools of how to involve the public, in what stage, up to what depth to make it as effective and efficient as the situation allows. Urban walks present one of the methods of stakeholder involvement in which participants, usually local citizens, are guided through a walk in the site with experts explaining their ideas and collecting remarks from the participants. They offer an opportunity for community engagement and informal discussion on various topics in the decision-making processes, to witness successful examples and innovative tools. They are one of the most appropriate ways for awareness rising among the general public, as they offer in-situ exploration together with face-to-face discussions with professionals who are guiding the walk. The paper examines two case studies of urban walks. Firstly, a set of 8 urban walks taking place within the INTERREG-Central Europe BhENEFIT project aimed at raising awareness and building capacities in the field of sustainable management of historic built areas. Altogether, there were 148 participants in these events, and at the end of the urban walks, they filled in the feedback forms. Responsible partners also prepared detailed reports about all of these events and, together with feedback forms, these are analysed and the results are presented within this paper. Secondly, the paper uses a case study from Rome (Italy) within the Jane's Walk International Festival presented at the III Biennial of Public Space. The method of urban walks had been selected as a proper way to involve citizens in the project, to help disseminate the project results and make the citizens a part of the decision making in historic built areas in the project pilot sites. The results from the analysed reports give evidence supporting the effectiveness of this method. The paper further on discusses different forms of public involvement for future events and ways how to include the public in the decision-making processes.