Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Despite appeals in the literature and practice for more participation, there is still little insight on what participation does and how participatory techniques affect the people involved. In this research, I address this gap by examining a recent initiative to establish a memorial in the public sphere. Particularly, I present a reading of a controversial case, the National Holocaust Memorial of Names in Amsterdam. This initiative triggered a passionate dispute at the local level, which ultimately led to a legal battle to block the siting of the memorial in Amsterdam’s Plantage neighborhood. The National Holocaust Memorial of Names is a case in point. On the one hand, this controversy reflected the discourse and practice of the participation process itself. On the other hand, it reflected the nature of the issue around which discussion was focused. Aligned with critical approaches to analyzing democracy, emotional participation, and processes of memorialization, I seek to highlight the typical participation traps (Howlett and Ramesh 2016) and antagonisms (Mouffe 1988, 2005, 2013) that characterized the case of Amsterdam. Although the project originated in a private initiative, the main responsibility of involving citizens in planning, lied with the local government.