| Abstrakt: |
It is widely agreed that technical innovation and behavioral changes have to be part of any sustainability strategy. Pursued in isolation, however, they miss out on the significant potential of strategic synchronization of technical and social change, in order to facilitate sustainable behavior through appropriate material infrastructures. Such strategies require detailed knowledge about people’s preferences and willingness to adopt new socio-technical settings. It is suggested that this knowledge is best acquired through participatory design processes because of an assumed causal link between decision-making process and sustainable outcome. A no-fuss, top-down approach with very little participation – as practiced in Singapore – could challenge this claim if empirical evidence showed that it is equally capable of providing urban infrastructures that facilitate sustainable behaviors. This article describes such a test. It detects an incongruence between normative preferences for participatory design and the actual result of Singapore’s approach. However, it also questions the implications of these findings, especially their transferability and the seemingly implied conclusion about the substitutability of public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
