Public participation, technological discourses and the scale of GIS Stuart C. Aitken Chapter 27 27.1 INTRODUCTION If, as some researchers suggest, local struggles are characterized as scale dependent, and if the works of community activists are ‘spatially fixed’ at the local level, then it is likely that they will continue as relatively unsup- ported endeavours because they fail to gain recognition and respect from larger political constituencies (cf. Herod 1991; Smith 1992; Delaney and Leitner 1997). The case studies in this volume suggest that, at its best, PPGIS offers the possibility of respect and credibility for residents, activists, and concerned citizens involved in planning, development, and environmental management. Is it possible that PPGIS enables a breakthrough of local prac- tices and community concerns from what John Agnew (1993: 252) calls ‘hidden geographies’ of scale? The purpose of this chapter is to raise questions about the kind of par- ticipation that is afforded by ‘user-friendly’ PPGIS and the potential for enabling certain local issues to ‘jump scale’ (Smith 1993) and forge a larger political constituency. The first part of the paper discusses what constitutes public participation, and draws on contemporary critiques of Habermas’ notion of the ‘public sphere’. The second locates some of the work on PPGIS in this debate by assessing the ways in which it may politicize issues and overcome hidden geographies of scale. Concerns are raised about some forms of PPGIS that may perpetuate instrumental discourses as barriers to democracy and communication in the public sphere. 27.2 RE-THINKING PUBLIC PARTICIPATION It may be argued that the acceptance of GISs as spatial data platforms and analytic resources upon which informed decisions can be made in many ways legitimizes certain local issues as larger public concerns. The increas- ingly user-friendly status of this technology, and the development of GIS research and applications within public service institutions, such as © 2002 Taylor & Francis universities, combine to make public participation and community focus inevitable. For example, as one of the more cited uses of PPGIS, ongoing work in Minneapolis by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota seeks to ingratiate the capabilities of GIS and MapInfo to com- munity groups so that they may access publicly available information on local toxic hazards through Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), Petrofund and Superfund sites, and also resource databases on schools, community cen- tres, senior care, daycare centres and local parks (McMaster et al. 1997; Leitner et al. this volume). The point is that researchers can share their knowledge in a participatory setting that might enable appropriate and eth- ical kinds of collaboration with community groups. In addition, web-based GIS technology is now relatively accessible to the extent that some argue that criticism of GIS’s elitism is no longer valid (Kingston, this volume) and virtual GISs are appropriate conduits for participatory planning in low- income neighbourhoods (Krygier, this volume). If the costs and hierarchical constraints to access are eroding, then so too are geographic limitations as GIS becomes a valuable tool to highlight local problems in more remote parts of the globe (cf. Laituri, this volume; Jordan, this volume). Indeed, some evidence suggests that PPGIS is not only valuable but is increasingly appreciated by previously skeptical locals (Kyem, this volume). Optimistic rhetoric surrounds much of this research, with phrases like ‘empowerment of marginalized people’ joining with notions of ‘public participation’ and ‘community involvement’. So, perhaps we have come a long way from John Pickles’ (1995) cautioning about technological elitism, but I want to argue that there is still concern about how PPGIS is situated in larger discourses of planning and policy-making. And so I’d like to step back a little from the optimism to consider what precisely is meant by public participation, and what is enabling about GIS technology. In some ways I am revisiting concerns that Suzanne Michel and I raised about how GIS modelling in the global north is situated in instrumental notions of planning that obfuscated the face-to-face communications of practical day-to-day planning and policy making (Aitken and Michel 1995). Globalization processes expand to most countries in the world the arguments we made about GIS modelling incorporating inappropriately mechanistic and instrumental forms of planning. As Trevor Harris and Dan Weiner point out, current GIS developments in the global south are located within a modernist ‘development’ paradigm, which is top-down, technicist, and elitist. As a result, Western definitions of knowledge and meaning are perpetuated globally as technical data and spatially integrated decision- support systems (Harris et al. 1995; Weiner et al. 1995; Harris and Weiner 1996, and this volume). Proponents of PPGIS argue that alternative forms of GIS production are possible and the varied case studies in this volume suggest that these can be context specific rather than general, and they can be communicative rather than instrumental. It might be argued then, that 358 S. C. Aitken © 2002 Taylor & Francis some forms of PPGIS go a long way toward resolving the criticisms of general modelling and instrumentality in GIS that Suzanne and I raised. But public participation carries with it a host of connotations that require careful consideration. 27.2.1 The public and private status of actions When talking about participation, there is sometimes confusion over the public and private status of actions such as environmental activism, ‘cleaning up’ neighbourhoods, community participation and local planning endeavours. Some feminists voice concern that these actions tend to mirror women’s domestic concerns (child-care, housing safety, the environment) without any obvious impact upon larger political and civic cultures (Wilson 1991; Garber 1995; Staeheli 1996). Put simply, there is concern that because some activi- ties amount to ‘public housekeeping’ they are easily dismissed at the scale of cities or regions by the same ‘city fathers’ who shrug-off responsibilities over social and local welfare in the first place. This raises not only the issue of the content of local activism and planning, but also the scale at which it is practised and the notion of hidden, and enervating, geographies of scale. The inability of some local activist groups to make headway against city, state, and federal jurisdictions and the dismissal of local groups’ concerns for environmental, domestic and child-rearing issues speak eloquently of the persistence of a public political culture that denies access to certain groups. The question that PPGIS raises relates to the access and, by extension, the legitimacy that is offered by technological approaches to the analysis of spatial data and their attendant visualization techniques (see Krygier, this volume). Setting aside the well-worn arguments about the impediments of cost, knowledge about, and access to the technology, does GIS garner legiti- macy for local housekeeping issues in a largely patriarchal society? Are GIS- savvy arguments sufficient to enable community-based constituencies to jump scale from the local to larger public political cultures? Much of contemporary academic understanding of public political cul- ture comes from Jürgen Habermas’s critique of a modern lifeworld colo- nized by the logic of instrumental rationality and strategic management that denies the need for face-to-face contact. Habermas was particularly inter- ested in the conditions that allowed the public sphere to be established, how it was materially transformed over time, and what that transforma- tion meant for the possibility of a progressive formal democracy (Calhoun 1992). He argued that progressive democracy is offset by a contemporary public realm that is alienating, and calls for a ‘paradigm shift’ from a phi- losophy of consciousness and self to a philosophy of language and com- munication embedded in his theory of reasoned action (Habermas 1984; 1989). In this formulation, space and action not only convey information, but also transmit collective political and moral meaning and, consequently, Public participation, technology and the scale of GIS 359 © 2002 Taylor & Francis notions of justice. In an important sense, issues of justice come down to who gets heard, how they get heard, and where they are constructed in rela- tion to the public sphere. It seems to me that this is where PPGIS may offer some legitimate public engagement that transcends and transforms notions of local activism out of the arena of public housekeeping. Lynn Staeheli (1996) points out that the public and private status of actions is often equated with the spaces in which they occur such as homes, community centres, planning departments, or council chambers. Public policy-makers and analysts tend to equate public actions with public spaces, and private actions with private spaces. Local actions, then, become part of a community politics that loses power through a rigid and static conceptualization of scale with the home being the lowest point of entry and the state the highest. The introduction to this book argues that the potential of web-based PPGIS enables a ‘public participation ladder’ that begins with a simple ‘right to know’ but ends with full participation in decision-making, arguing that PPGIS and the web break down potential barriers to participa- tion at each level. Traditional public participation has been limited to ‘the right to know’, ‘informing the public’, and ‘the public’s right to object’ (the first three levels of participation). The web, Kingston (this volume) argues, enables higher levels of participation. The ability to define interests, deter- mine agendas, assess risks, recommend solutions and participate in decision- making is enhanced by a web-based platform because, among other things, ‘certain psychological elements which the public face when expressing their points of view at public meetings’ are erased. This is an important point to the extent that the web muddies up the private/public divide because it establishes a public arena that people can access from the privacy of their homes. But the seemingly magical ability to surf around a virtual council meeting not only hides the technologies, platforms and capital that makes this possible, but it also hides the ways that technologies, platforms and capital create scale. The boundaries, borders and processes of access in the web and in GIS technology combine to create complex stories that include financiers, computer programmers, software and hardware developers, as well as the users of the technologies. By focusing on these seemingly innocuous con- structions of scale, it is sometimes possible to uncover manipulations of the web that foster quite profound social and political ramifications. 27.3 SPATIAL STORIES AND SCALE DEPENDENCIES Stories about the construction of PPGIS are of some interest with regard to how scale relations are created. Moreover, the mechanics of decision-sup- port systems, websites, search engines and issues of who controls access relate not only to the creation of scale relations but also to the use of tech- 360 S. C. Aitken © 2002 Taylor & Francis nologies and graphic interfaces to represent scale. Well-grounded local PPGISs are replete with examples of cartographically based hierarchical scale relations that are created ostensibly to help the user sift through a flood of information by, e.g. zooming up and down from the macro to the micro, but which also represent forms of steering that create boundaries and hide commercial and political influences. In a recent paper, I use sev- eral examples of GIS-based websites to make the point that the apparent ease with which scale relations are visualized by the technology point to very complex stories of how sites are linked, how public and private coali- tions are created, and how free access is determined and vested with com- mercial interests (Aitken 1999). Some proponents of PPGIS technologies embrace the virtual environments that they create as a mirror on reality or as an appropriate alternative reality with little consideration of the political and cultural implications of how these environments produce space and scale. The contrivance of scale and the seemingly natural delineation of regions are particularly susceptible to the vagrancies of these new tech- nologies. Space and scale are social constructions and the very notion of ‘fixing’ them so that we may travel through or up and down them with ease presupposes a particular way of thinking about the world that is based on Cartesian logic and forged out of instrumental and strategic reasoning. This is the ‘god-trick’ (Haraway 1991), the idea that powerful people are able to take on positions as disembodied master subjects. It derives from a Cartesian objectivity that determines a view of everywhere from no partic- ular location, ‘a view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). The ‘view from nowhere’ is facilitated further when Cartesian logic (some- times in the form of maps, plans and fly throughs) is embellished with tech- nical and instrumental discourses that do not necessarily serve local needs. Sarah Elwood notes how the introduction of technology at the local plan- ning level actually changes the way some residents think about the planning process. PPGIS is empowering in some ways, but she notes that it may also disenfranchise certain sectors of a community (Elwood and Leitner 1998; Elwood 2000, and this volume). Elwood’s work points specifically to discourse and the use of language. A longitudinal study of local activists in Powderhorn, a multi-ethnic inner-city neighbourhood in Minneapolis, revealed important changes in the ways some participants used certain words and phrases to actualize their agenda. It was quite clear that those who adopted technical GIS and planning jargon felt more empowered and respected as legitimate partners in the planning process (Elwood 2000). A consequent shift in the goals formulated by some residents was evident, such as the adoption of a ‘Variance Matrix’ to assist with neighbourhood decisions regarding housing and land-use with particular emphasis on requests for code variances. Elwood argues that the variance matrix shifted local emphasis to a strongly instrumental approach to neighbourhood space, focusing on a quantitative GIS data base and standardized decision-making Public participation, technology and the scale of GIS 361 © 2002 Taylor & Francis using the Matrix. Those who were suspicious of the technology or grounded their discourse in everyday language felt alienated, that their voices were not being heard or, worse, that those who learned the technical language were capitulating to an Orwellian system of ‘double-speak’. A different example of scale sensitive research that is concerned about the complex constituencies of the public and the private is Mei-Po Kwan’s (1999a,b; 2000) use of GIS technology to help unravel the day-to-day con- straints on women’s activities. Her concerns about the public and the private focuses on actions inside and out of the home, and how these are contextu- alized as ‘fixity constraints’ that emanate from larger urban scale accessibil- ity patterns. She proposes that GISs be used to help interpret constraints on women’s daily rounds. Whereas Elwood’s study embraces the complexity of the interface between technology and users, and is advancing the way urban planning contexts (and democracy) are theorized, Kwan is concerned specif- ically about scale and public and private spaces. Unfortunately, the kind of work that Elwood and Kwan engage comprises only a very small part of what constitutes GIS research. 27.3.1 Transforming the public sphere The implication of what I am saying here is that the maps and discourses that surround PPGIS, planning and environmental management may be the primary means through which boundaries are established and spatial dif- ferentiation takes place. This, of course, simplifies an extremely complex set of processes but signals a need to look more carefully at what Gregson and Lowe (1995: 224–225) call the over-identification of geographers (and planners) with the instrumental logic and language of capitalist production of time-space when they really need to focus on ‘the full range of geographic scales’ including the day-to-day contexts of lived experience that are not ensconced in standardized codes. Staeheli suggests that concerns over scale may help us focus on the relationship between activity and space in which the questions that develop are about the transgression of certain socially coded spaces and activities. In other words, it is the constitution and trans- formation of public space – and hence public and private spheres, and planning at both local and regional scales – that is of crucial importance (Staeheli et al. forthcoming). The ways that PPGIS potentially transforms public space is through a reconstitution of scale dependencies, but not if they become embroiled in specialized and potential debilitating technical and instrumental discourses. This begs the question of whether it is possi- ble to jump scale using PPGIS while engaging discourses that are commu- nicative and do not obfuscate, what happens to those who are ‘planned for’ in the planning process? The question returns me to Habermas and feminist agendas that arise from the critique of his work. 362 S. C. Aitken © 2002 Taylor & Francis 27.4 STRONG PUBLICS AND THE POLITICIZATION OF LOCAL CONCERNS Nancy Fraser (1997: 70) criticizes any conceptualization of Habermas’s public sphere that suggests it is constituted as anything outside of the private sphere. A public sphere used in this way conflates scale relations between the nation, the community, and the economy of paid employ- ment on the one hand, and arenas of public discourse on the other. Fraser contends that we need to focus on multiple public spheres, a point that Habermas neglects with his focus only on the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. Counterpublics (as Fraser calls them) contest the exclusion- ary norms and scale dependency of Habermas’s singular bourgeois public. Habermas’s public sphere is not only problematically singular, but also pre- supposes the desirability of separation between civil society and the state and, thus, it distinguishes practice in speech communities from ideological space (i.e. the state). Fraser argues that this distinction promotes weak publics where action consists exclusively of opinion formation through communities of speech and does not encompass decision-making which is left to the state. Strong publics encompass both opinion formation and decision-making which is authoritative to the extent that strong publics are able to set the terms of the debate for weaker publics. Strong publics help construct any given ‘common sense’ of the day and they usually figure strongly in defining, however vaguely, what is political in the discourse sense (Fraser 1989: 167). Perhaps the most poignant example of PPGIS raising a strong public that enables local issues to jump scale revolves around the activism and research that outlines concerns of environmental racism. In this research and activism, GIS is used to visualize and conceptualize a form of racism whereby waste and pollution facilities are located disproportionately in poor and minority urban neighbourhoods. Sui (1994) cites the ground- breaking work of Burke (1993) who uses socio-economic data from the Census’s TIGER files and TRI data to determine where toxic release facili- ties are located in Los Angeles County. Burke’s statistical analysis suggested a strong association between low income, minority status, and the location of toxic release sites. In general, the poorer the area and the higher its minority percentage, the greater the number of toxic waste facilities in the area. Laura Pulido and her colleagues (Pulido 1996; Pulido et al. 1996) cau- tion that works that focus solely on problematic census variables (like race) often miss the importance of evaluating social processes, including class for- mation and local conceptualizations of racism. As a consequence, Burke’s work was followed by other studies on urban environmental health issues that used qualitative methods and ethnographies as well as quantitative assessments (Cole and Eyles 1997; McMaster et al. 1997; Jerrett et al. 1998). The important point about this work for what I want to say here is Public participation, technology and the scale of GIS 363 © 2002 Taylor & Francis that the GIS community enabled a strong public in helping to define ‘envi- ronmental racism’ as part of a larger political culture and, at the local level, qualitative data and quantitative spatial analyses empowered community decision-making. Fraser (1989: 167) notes that ‘it is the relative power of various publics that determines the outcome of struggles over the boundaries of the politi- cal.’ Her writings deny a homogenized, mechanistic and institutional space for democracy and justice wherein communication and consensus may evolve because such a space denies the practical implications of a social and hierarchical construction of scale that makes access from one scale to another or, alternatively, from a weak to a strong public, difficult. The issue that Fraser broaches in highlighting these kinds of scale relations pivots on how local concerns become politically charged at other scales so that they cannot be dismissed as public housekeeping. Scale as conceptualized here is political, not Cartesian. As suggested in the opening sentence of this chap- ter, Cartesian logic suggests the myth of actions bound by scale. But as William Bunge (1977: 65) noted many years ago, ‘geography recognizes that people operate at various scales simultaneously’ and, in this sense, it offers a sophisticated understanding of scale that is missing from other sciences. Disregarding how social relations are scaled to create difference misses a significant potential of PPGIS. Assuming that some unseen democratic process simply propels political action along a clearly delimited trajectory from the local to the urban to the national evokes the metaphor that cream rises to the top or, in reverse, that the trickle-down effects of large-scale economic policies actually help inner-city neighbourhoods. Worse still is the assumption that scale arises simply out of some simplistic notion of cartographic hierarchy and a representation of space in this way enables political struggle, progressive or reactionary, to shape political discourse. Clearly this is not the case, but PPGIS can be part of creating strong multiple publics that augment democracy. They do so by enabling people to become involved at a level that does not obfuscate their daily lives through maps and language drawn from instrumental, strategic logic. 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