Public participation around the development of a bridge in Amsterdam, photo by Nanke Verloo

This project is conducted collaboratively by the City of Amsterdam’s Municipal Team on Participation (STP), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). Led by Nanke Verloo and Stan Majoor, the research aims to dive into the challenges and practices of planning professionals in doing public participation.

We assess how the municipalities’ new participation regulation is applied in planning practice, how civil servants deal with obstacles within the municipal administrative structure, and how citizens of Amsterdam experience public participation around urban planning projects. By ethnographically tracing the practices of all those involved – from citizens to planners, civil servants, consultants, managers, and politicians – we seek to enhance participation practices and the opportunities to speak back to spatial interventions in the built environment.

Through collaboration with the municipality, we receive unique “behind-the-scenes” access to the municipal offices and planning practitioners where we observe meetings among civil servants who make decisions on participation goals, levels of influence, and scope and to participatory meetings where these ambitions turn into concrete interactions with citizens. This qualitative work includes observations, interviews, focus groups, and document analysis, with an emphasis on real-time process observation to capture discrepancies between stated intentions and actual practices. We combine that qualitative work with a municipal-wide survey to anonymously collect information about the experiences and backgrounds of participants.

The project timeline runs from 2025 to the end of 2026, with phased deliverables including interim reports and final recommendations to the City Council, which will evaluate and decide about the continuation of the new participation regulations in spring 2027.

The ultimate goal is to produce actionable insights to improve the quality, inclusivity, and effectiveness of citizen participation in Amsterdam’s governance.

The first output was an Interim Report that you can find here:

  • Verloo, N., Majoor, S. Knoester, B. & Groen, B. (2025) Tussentijdse bevindingen Ervaringsonderzoek Participatieverordening. Universiteit van Amsterdam in opdracht van de Gemeente Amsterdam.
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