Implementation of the Habitat-agenda - residents' interest and actions in citizen-participation processes – a comparison of residential areas in Sweden and Russia

Abstract

Within the politics of sustainable development citizens are expected to play an active and direct role in the implementation process. The potential for citizens to actually assume this role remains, however, unclear. This paper explores the prerequisites for citizen participation in accordance with the UN document the Habitat-agenda. In the paper we discuss the actual requirements for democratic
participation in local urban communities, emphasising the level of the individual, in both the Swedish and the Russian context. Do residents have the interest, time and will to work as local actors toward sustainable habitation? Is there a difference in collective action in Swedish and the Russian residential areas? This has been studied in the context of four cases: the small-house area Kungsgärdet and the multi-family house area Gottsunda in Sweden, and the small-house area Perevalka and multi-family house area Drjevlanka in Russia. The results indicate that the conditions cannot be considered optimal in any of the cases, as local participation is generally not prioritised by the citizens. Some differences emerged in terms of attitudes concerning general participation in local matters between the four residential areas, though a clear exception here was the question of citizen participation in actual planning or implementation processes, which afforded relatively similar results in all four cases. Few people actively participated or wanted to participate. In one of the Russian areas, however, a few of the respondents expressed an interest in participating for change in the area, which is the first prerequisite for implementing the Habitat agenda. An initial assumption of the study was that participation would be greater in Swedish residential areas, due to Sweden's relatively long tradition of democratic practice, as compared to Russia. That assumption can now, in general, be dismissed even if there was slightly higher citizen participation for change in the Swedish cases.