Beyond the rhetoric of participation: New challenges and prospects for inclusive urban regeneration Guido Ferilli a , Pier Luigi Sacco a, * , Giorgio Tavano Blessi a, b a Department of Comparative Literature and Language Science, IULM University, Via Carlo Bo,1, 20143 Milan, Italy b Department of Sociology and Economic Law, University of Bologna, Via San Giacomo 3, 40126 Bologna, Italy article info Article history: Received 1 January 2015 Received in revised form 7 August 2015 Accepted 8 September 2015 Available online 9 October 2015 Keywords: Participation Storytelling Empowerment Community informatics Relational public art and culture projects abstract We carry out a critical analysis of current participation practices in urban regeneration processes. Many concrete examples suffer from major flaws in terms of instrumental or ineffective involvement of parts of the community, and especially of the weakest and most deprived constituencies, at the advantage of more affluent and experienced ones, which are familiar enough with institutionalized public decision making to surf and manipulate the deliberation dynamics at their own advantage. Below a superficial rhetoric of inclusion, cosmetic forms of participation are therefore at risk of perpetuating and even exacerbating existing inequalities. We then explore new possibilities for more effective and sustainable forms of participation, most notably social storytelling, community informatics, and relational public art and culture projects. A new, interesting frontier of future experimentation in participation practices can be found in innovative forms of coalescence among these three streams of activity, as testified by a few state of the art pilot projects and experiences. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Participation in urban regeneration: A failed promise? The furor for urban renewal and regeneration, which has glob- ally taken over in the past three decades, started with very high expectations (Alden, 1996). In stated intentions, such processes should have ensured the combined pursuit of economic and social growth goals with objectives of social cohesion and integration of marginalized areas and communities (Couch, Sykes, & B€ orstinghaus, 2011), but as a matter of fact, most of the socially sustainable experiences have taken place in relatively wealthy and un-deprived contexts (Raco, 2003), and the key narratives have been mainly created and deployed by big private stakeholders rather than by the local communities (Peck, 2006). In the current historical juncture, there is a widespread feeling that decades of egalitarian urban and social policies have achieved less than hoped in practical terms as to curbing the capacity of the richest and most powerful global and local elites in shaping up urban environments and the corresponding planning discourse according to their own interests and needs e thereby raising a rich array of negative feelings and defensive attitudes in local communities, which are too often removed rather than positively tackled by planners (Forrester, 2012). And as a consequence, local communities are beginning to organize themselves to resist to unwanted in- terventions (Uysal, 2012) or more simply to engage in passive resistance survival strategies (Mathers, Parry, & Jones, 2008). The choice to contrast or simply to opt out of processes which, at least in principle, aim at giving space and relevance to weak, poor social constituencies at the decision-making and governance levels must, therefore, be read as a sign of skepticism and as a protest by the latter against a rhetoric of inclusion covering up the real decisional process, which takes place at a table where ‘marginal’ interests are simply neither represented nor considered as truly relevant. In a long-term perspective, the shift in discourse from classic top-down, ‘scientific’ approaches to urban renewal and planning e most often closely related to huge vested interests e to inclusive, participative approaches where all kinds of social actors have a chance to speak and to be attentively listened to, is evident, and started well before the current urban renewal cycle (Camarinhas, 2011). But the graphic contradiction between intentions and re- sults as far as actual involvement is concerned is no less than an elephant in the room, and is explicitly challenging the meaning- fulness and defensibility of participatory practices, and of the very notion of urban regeneration in the first place (Lawless, 2010). There is a well-known backbone of classical contributions that have * Corresponding author. E-mail address: pierluigi.sacco@iulm.it (P.L. Sacco). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect City, Culture and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ccs http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2015.09.001 1877-9166/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. City, Culture and Society 7 (2016) 95e100