Community-led planning for safety: A poisoned chalice?

• In Event: Ecologies of security 2

Abstract

Community planning for safety has taken multiple shapes and forms over the years and across the globe, in many of which the community element has been merely tokenistic. The term ‘community-led’ in the title is chosen to distinguish such tokenistic models from these models of planning for safety where certain members of a community come together to collaboratively engage into a decision-making process about tackling the safety issues that affect their community. This paper highlights some of the limitations of and challenges to the democratic promise of community-led planning for safety models by exploring the horizontal, rather than the vertical, power asymmetries that underlie them. Part of this task involves identifying the groups of people who are frequently treated as outsiders to ‘community’ thus being excluded from these processes and by examining the power differentials that operate within and affect the outcomes of these democratic experiments. Another issue that will be explored is the ways in which decisions and actions taken as a result of these processes can have material consequences for the people who are either excluded or otherwise silenced and hence have no control over them. Therefore, the underlying question that this paper seeks to address is to what extent and in which ways community-led planning for safety can amount to counterintuitive outcomes where social and political inequalities are perpetuated thus rendering such democratic experiments oppressive rather than emancipatory. This research constitutes an exploratory theory-building exercise, that may act as a springboard to further empirical research on the democratic promises and limitations of such practices.

Author

• Leo Kritikos, University of Edinburgh