This essay describes the transformation of civic participation from a tool of democratization into a tool for elite authority. Looking at various participatory projects in community-based organizations in a city in America’s Rust Belt, the essay demonstrates how the very architecture of civil society is being manipulated to marginalize dissent. This raises the question of whether the design of institutions has outpaced our critiques of them.

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Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press
2013
Issue Section:
Twenty-First-Century Urbanism
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