7. Public participation

Three changes have been indicated as being important in order to achieve more sustainable urban planning: at the administrative core responsible for planning, in the information system through territorial observatories or similar systems, and also in the forms of participation. Of these three, participation would appear to be the key element for achieving more sustainable planning. The investment in fostering participation would have to be prioritised, as is done with infrastructures... or events. This investment should be oriented towards organising campaigns and work groups to recover the loss of public awareness that has occurred in recent years owing to a number of factors, including the authorities' lukewarm interest in encouraging it. As well as recovering the major deficit in participatory culture based on incentivising public involvement in decision-making, instead of taking it away, as has occurred on several occasions. In short, the goal is to replace the reserved, elitist consensus of property operations with a broad, transparent consensus. Participation also needs an essential support: information. Participation in planning makes no sense at all without appropriate, reliable information. That is why permanent observation systems in the territories being planned —ones that work properly and engage with the public— are so important. However, even if adequate, reliable information may exist, alone it is not enough, because it is essential for the information to be conveyed to lay people in such a way that it can be readily understood. However, in many cases planning includes technical details that are difficult to turn into easily comprehensible ideas for non-technicians. That is why it is so important to have an interactive educational process between technicians and members of the public with no specific knowledge of urban planning. The bodies (or single body, as the case may be) responsible for drafting and monitoring the plan and observing the territory must also assume the task of education and dissemination of issues related to urban planning. This can be done in many ways, from conferences and courses to Internet forums and information sites, but in any case a dissemination and education programme should be included as an integral part of the plan itself, regardless of whether public information in its purely legal sense is maintained. In this way the urban plan would take on quite a different dimension from its current one, to achieve something more than merely determining the content of land-ownership rights. In any case, either as proposed in previous approaches or via similar systems, public participation in the planning process should be included as yet another component of the plan.