The #GoodMove chaos in Brussels is something that should worry those of us who advocate for citizen participation, and those of us who care about citizen action on the environment. lesoir.be/473320/article…
For those not close to it, a series of traffic calming and car-excluding measures are being taken in Brussels to reduce car traffic and air pollution. They had a good, not perfect, but good citizen engagement process lasting over a year before anything was done.
The headlines are about yesterday’s meeting in the commune of Schaerbeek, where protests got physical with a group of men tearing down the new signs for the traffic scheme – the bigger issue is the political fear that is now freezing the tens of schemes in the pipeline.
Right now it looks like only Bruxelles-Ville and one of the projects in Schaerbeek are going to see the light of day any time soon, after this has been discussed for *years*. Let’s be clear, this is not banning cars. This is reducing their prominence in dense urban areas.
And yet violent protest from a tiny number and loud angry voices from a small minority is derailing schemes across the whole city-region. After, I say again, a good citizen participation project (realistic in scale and open in approach for the question it was trying to answer).
It’s particularly notable that some of the angry voices are mentioning the participation (300 citizens in Schaerbeek for instance) as being laughable and irrelevant. Because they disagree with the outcome, they disagree with the process.
So, are we wrong about citizen participation reducing the barriers to implementation of these sorts of schemes – or at least, is the level of engagement required to get general public confidence disproportionately large?
And can we involve citizens in these difficult climate decisions in the time we have left? I believe that the answer to both questions is yes, that’s why we’re working on @NetZeroCitiesEU, but I can’t deny a frisson of concern about what is happening in my city.
It’s worth noting that @elkevdbrandt and @PhilippeClose among others have been trying to give political leadership – but they have been rare bright lights in a general picture of uncertainty and backtracking.
I know that some people will see this and think ‘just have more citizen assemblies’ but 300 people in Schaerbeek did not make a difference to the angry voices, and it is the angry voices who are causing the problem.
I don’t have any easy answers myself. It’s something I’ll be thinking hard about as we move ahead with our work in 112 cities (including Brussels!) on reaching net zero.
