Citizen Participation: A Matter of Competency

Abstract

Citizens are social actors willing to give their time and energy to participate in collective projects, in order to live better in their built environment. Thus, the inhabitant is not only apprehended as a figure of belonging to a place, but he is perceived as being able to act on his environment, to be in connection with it. He is the one who invents his living environment and, beyond, transforms the city in the same way as the other actors. Individuals must acquire skills to become effective participatory citizens and live together in peace and on an equal footing in democratic societies. The recent work in the social sciences, which deals with "scholarly knowledge" and "ordinary knowledge", makes it possible to conclude on this notion of skills and to make the link with the question of the participation of the inhabitants. The "scholarly knowledge" is classified as scientific academic and professional knowledge, opposing knowledges qualified as profane or ordinary, that is to say, shared "by all or part of the social world". From a systemic point of view, the process of participation would be the meeting of these academic knowledge and lay knowledge. The purpose of this article is to understand what types of skills the resident uses, as a resource person, a living force, to engage in the process of participation.