Participatory Democracy and Land Development: A Case Study of the South Downtown Waterfront Redevelopment in Saskatoon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is growing expectation by the public for a greater degree of participatory democracy in planning and development. Governments have responded to this expectation by increasing the amount of public consultation. Still, public discontent with the efficacy of public consultations including the level of participation, accessibility, transparency and accountability remains. This thesis focuses on the importance of the quality over the quantity of public consultations to improve satisfaction with government decision making related to land use planning and development. More specifically, it focuses on the following elements: the types and levels of public consultation, accessibility of the consultations for different stakeholders, the influence of stakeholders in decision-making, and the meaning attached by stakeholders to the consultation experience in various planning and development processes. This thesis examines the degree of participatory democracy within the context of a case study of public consultation undertaken by the City of Saskatoon between 2000 and 2010 to plan and develop the South Downtown Waterfront Redevelopment. The analysis is rooted in theoretical and conceptual frameworks contained within the relevant literature on public consultation drawn from different disciplines. The case study produced several key findings; the most notable is that the stakeholder assessment of the value or efficacy of public consultations used by the City is affected by the mechanisms in which they participate. Public sector and business sector stakeholders invited by the City to participate in central participative mechanisms, such as steering committees, expressed a higher degree of confidence that the consultations had significant positive influence in shaping the project. By contrast, community stakeholders invited by the City to participate in less participative mechanisms, such as open houses, expressed a lower degree of confidence that the public consultations had significant positive influence in shaping the project. This thesis concludes by recommending that the City of Saskatoon enhance participatory democracy in land use planning and development by: expanding the 'Community Engagement Model' to encompass the full 'Public Participation Spectrum' for all stakeholders; establish a complementary evaluation framework based on normative participation principles; expand the types and levels of public consultation available; and, adopt more inclusionary, accountable and transparent public consultation practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".