Ticking Boxes : Everyday Participation in the Urban Redevelopment Planning of Waterloo, Sydney

In December 2015, the New South Wales state government announced a massive urban renewal project for Waterloo Estate, one of the largest public housing estates in Australia, situated in Waterloo, a suburb located in inner-city Sydney. An essential component of this redevelopment proposal was a twelve-month participatory process that included a non binding consultation process led by private consultancies, featuring capacity-building workshops and community engagement activities. As in different cities, this participatory process followed a larger trend in urban redevelopments that advocates for local community participation to decentralise power and support collaborative planning. Nonetheless, in Waterloo, after several workshops, public meetings, and online consultations, residents remain unable to see their “needs” and “aspirations” – as announced by the program – reflected in the final masterplan. This contradiction raises the main question for this research project, which aimed to understand the apparent paradox of democratic initiatives constantly appearing in different contexts, and yet residents continuing to feel unheard, frustrated, demobilised, controlled, and threatened by a topdown process that was bringing ambiguous “improvement” to their lives...