six - Struggling: discussing the substantive issues at hand

Summary

‘[S]uch a person needs years before he has recognition … and then from what the residents are saying he is able to translate that in concrete steps in his organisation. And yeah … that's of course a continuous process.’ (Mohammed – resident, Amsterdam)

After having seen how public professionals and citizens engage with the situation in which they meet, this chapter looks at what they talk about and in what ways. Discussing the substantive issues at hand is a continuous struggling with taking on board unknown knowledge about rules, structures, and policies, and acknowledging the feelings, beliefs and experiences of others. The opening quote from Mohammed (a brisk and assertive young man with a migrant background, a lot of participatory experience and a sceptical attitude towards the authorities) reveals that discussing substantive issues is anything but a neutral and straightforward transmission of information: it is ‘a continuous process’ of getting recognition to take part in conversations and learning to translate their content in meaningful ways. Merely facilitating public professionals and citizens to discuss substantive issues is not enough to get them to integrate their actionable understandings; truly unifying differences comes down to a subtle activity of recognising, empathising and appreciating what is being communicated. Public professionals and citizens will not manage to overcome their habitual pattern of communication if they lack the capacity to communicate about their struggling with the beliefs, perceptions, and feelings inherent to their actionable understandings.

Public professionals and residents in Glasgow are confronted with so many different pieces of information, knowledge and experience that they tend to defend their own expertise by taking a stance rather than recognising the value of others’ expertise. In Amsterdam, public professionals and residents are entangled in a process of getting under the skin (of problems, issues, people, experiences, events, relationships and so on): investing a great amount of time and energy in understanding the particulars of individual local problems, without being able to articulate or extrapolate this know-how to other situations. Having clearly established what counts as relevant expertise, public professionals and residents in Bologna are not able to consider local problems beyond the nuts and bolts of urban regeneration projects.