Participation and Community at the Landscape Scale

Abstract

Since its rise to prominence in the design and planning fields in the early to mid-1960s, citizen paritcipation processes and the contexts within which they occur have experienced an evolution that has impacted significantly both the practice of participation and the final results emanating from these processes. Over the last twenty years, several different methodologies have been crafted, each describing how groups of various sizes and constituencies could use participatory processes to address any number of issues and/or problems. Unfortunately, since smaller, “neighborhood scale” contexts were generally used as their primary referents, the transferability of these processes to larger, landscape-scale environments was in fact limileg; processes used in more densely populaled areas were found to be less well suited for use in langscapes where the impact of land ownership patterns, “company town” realities, and the role of ecological processes were much more integral to the success of the project or participatory process. This paper, filling a need for up-to-date case studies in participatory planning and design, identifies several critical issues to consider when utilizing participatory techniques in larger geograpaical and less densely-populated contexts. It then uses two case studies in the state of Oregon to illustrate these issues and to lead into a discussion of how participation at the landscape scale could and should evolve in the future.