“A Ladder of Citizen Participation”

Sherry Arnstein (1930-1997), a government official charged with citizen participation in the US federal Model Cities Program in the late 1960s and early 1970s uses the metaphor of a ladder to describe levels of citizens’ participation in urban programs and development decisions that affect their lives in this classic 1968 article from the Journal of the American Institute of Planners. At the lowest level of Arnstein’s ladder are three forms of nonparticipation: manipulation and therapy in which government contrives phony forms of participation, which are really aimed at getting citizens to accept a predetermined course of action. Two legitimate, but low, rungs of Arnstein’s ladder are informing and…