(PDF) 2016 - Devising hybrid forums. Tec

City analysis of ISSN: 1360-4813 Devising hybrid forums Ignacio Farías To cite this article: 10.1080/13604813.2016.119399 To link to this article: Published online: Submit your Article views: 36 View related View Crossmark data http://www. Download by: [The New School] CITY, 2016 VOL. 20, NO. 4, 549 –562, http://dx.doi.o Devising hybrid forums Technical democracy in a dangerous world Ignacio Farı´as The notion of hybrid forums has democracy’; that ethico-political (2009. Acting in an Uncertain MA: MIT Press), aims at the democratization ation among technical experts paper I study the managerial the 2010 earthquake and tsunami the genealogy, organization and sions underlying such collaborative between the notion of hybrid were devised by a Chilean consulting ondly, dwelling on the tension I show the limitations these about the present and future voice was constrained by and ermen mobilized forms of political of technical democracy. I conclude forums is not just to democratically concern, but also to actually Key words: citizen participation, natural disasters, urban planning 1. Introduction T he huge earthquake and tsunami that hit Chile in 2010, severely damaging five medium-sized cities and more than 1000 towns and villages, unleashed a fascinating and complex process of policy experimentation. The massive destruction of the urban fabric was not just officially framed as an opportunity to build a new and a better city—a goal that has become # 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading 550 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 To begin with, and given the incapacity of most municipalities (key governmental actors in a decentralized state such as Chile) to steer the reconstruction process, two types of exceptional governmental agencies were introduced in different affected regions, namely, public – private consortia and a regional planning office. Interestingly, these agencies did not just involve a redefini- tion of what government entails, but also a redefinition of the state of exception as invol- ving the production of a ‘bare land’ rather than of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 2005; Farı´as and Flores 2015). Secondly, given the lack of design-oriented urban planning instru- ments, reconstruction planning offices began to elaborate non-binding master plans for city reconstruction, in some cases starting from a new problematization of the city as a geo-urban assemblage (Farı´as 2014b). Beyond this, in order to cope with the task of reconstructing or repairing more than 300,000 housing units, the central govern- ment introduced new market arrangements shaped by definitions of the good to be exchanged and of market actors that radically differed from the existing norms in social housing markets (Farı´as 2014a). What the aforementioned policy exper- iments have in common is that they were mostly shaped by technocratic and expert con- siderations. In most cases, affected popu- lations, concerned groups or citizen initiatives played a secondary role or were directly excluded from consultation and decision-making regarding the reconstruction process. One of the most noteworthy excep- tions to this trend was the citizen participation process put forward by a private–public con- sortium in the small coastal city of Constitu- cio´n, Chile, which aimed at creating a ‘hybrid forum’ bringing together architects, engineers, managers and citizens in an open and democratic process of urban reconstruc- tion planning—a governance innovation that has gained a lot of attention in architecture and design theory circles (including at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012) and received national and international awards. Constitucio´n, it becomes possible and necess- ary to flag some tensions underlying current formulations and deployments of hybrid forums and technical democracy (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). The first and most fundamental of these is the tension between the concept and the device. Interest- ingly, in the Chilean case, hybrid forums have been deployed as procedural tools and offered by at least one consulting company to corporations, both governmental and private, for managing controversies. Accord- ingly, this case invites us to reflect upon the politics of devising hybrid forums. The second point refers to the tension between the hybrid forum as a public assembly and the multiple urban assemblages enacting the city in different ways and, more importantly, shaping the capacities of different actors to represent and act upon it. Hereby the story of the hybrid forums of Constitucio´n makes apparent that a mismatch between assemblies and assemblages brings the danger of a fabri- cation of hybrid forums, of producing politi- cal events constrained not by situational procedures, but by much more complex and pervasive urban assemblages. The third issue involves the tension between the hybrid forum as a space for the dialogical symmetri- zation of expertise and a space for other forms of claim-making that are not oriented towards reaching socio-technical consensus. This incapacity to host other forms of politi- cal representation and demonstration involves the risk of a trivialization of hybrid forums for instances of political decision- making. In conclusion, the stories of hybrid forums in Constitucio´n suggest that the key challenge for technical democracy is not just the symmetrization of expertise in the face of socio-technical uncertainties, but the very production and unfolding of uncertainty. 2. The consulting service: hybrid forums as concept or device? In December 2011, one of the most influential communications consultants in Chile, a 552 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 knowledge and scientific evidence that could support the client’s position. Today, he con- tinues, this is not possible anymore, as the boundaries between science, politics, econ- omics and society have become an open field of dispute for expert and lay knowledge, rational and emotional arguments, the rich and the poor, representatives and rep- resented, etc. In such new context—and this is the key move E. Tironi proposes—it is necessary to move from strategic communi- cation to open management. The key instru- ment for open management is what he calls ‘open forums’, building upon the work of Callon and colleagues on hybrid forums and technical democracy. Abierta, both the book and the method- ology it proposes, thus poses an important question regarding the managerial mobiliz- ation of technical democracy and, more gen- erally, hybrid forums as a concept and as a device. This tension actually underlies Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s (2009) book Acting in an Uncertain World, where these ideas are developed in more detail. On the one hand, the authors introduce the notion of ‘hybrid forums’ as a powerful concept with which to grasp and problema- tize the multiple, heterogeneous and compli- cated ways in which socio-technical controversies fueled by techno-scientific uncertainties currently unfold, the extent to which expertise and knowledge are currently contested and vindicated by heterogeneous actors, and the need for precautionary and reversible forms of political decision- making. As a conceptual figure, akin to other key conceptual figures in Science and Technology Studies, ranging from the ‘cyborg’ (Haraway 1985) to the ‘parliament of things’ (Latour 2004), hybrid forums are not empirical objects but conceptual tools to open up and problematize empirical fields (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) and, in particular, to challenge common understand- ings of democracy, representation and decision-making in politics and science. On the other hand, however, the authors propose a set of rather conventional criteria ‘base’ open forum. Thirdly, open forums need public legitimation, which can be achieved by establishing a coordinating board, including companies, consultants, government and civic society, responsible for the organization and monitoring of open forums, as well as for the implementation of possible agreements. Such ‘open’ methodology, E. Tironi (2011) explains, was developed for two recent consultancy jobs completed for Arauco. The first involved the question of how to conduct the certification process of the forest branch of the company, Arauco Bosques, which controls more than 1 million hectares of exotic species monocul- tures with a huge territorial impact. In a pre-audit report, the Forest Stewardship Council, an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) aimed at promoting responsible forest management, asked Arauco for improvements in 82 areas of its forest management process. Almost half of these observations were understood by Arauco (2010, 67) as having a ‘socio-techni- cal’ and, therefore, controversial character and, as they required addressing the com- pany’s mode of forest management in a com- prehensive way, and involved various affected and concerned groups. Following the methodology proposed above, an open forum with 17 actors, both internal and external to the company, was organized to define the main issues to be discussed in the- matic open forums, to nominate the partici- pants of these forums, as well as eventually assess the proposals coming from them. Six thematic forums met dozens of times during 2010 and 2011, while a website (www.foroabierto.cl) displayed the discus- sions in each forum, as well as the opinions and public interventions of the various groups and actors involved. Interestingly, one of the key statements that can be read on that website, as well as in the company’s annual report, and perhaps also in the report sent to the Forest Stewardship Council, is that ‘in Arauco we have created a method of participative resolution of [ . . . ] controversies’.1 554 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 contracted a group of more than 60 pro- fessionals from internationally recognized companies, including Elemental, the urban engineering company ARUP and the com- munication consulting company Tironi Aso- ciados, which was then commissioned to organize citizen participation. The post-disaster situation thus became a testing ground for the open forum method- ology that was being developed for the certi- fication of Arauco’s forest management process. According to E. Tironi (2011), given the urgency of the situation two options for the citizen participation process were then suggested. The first involved letting the master plan for city reconstruction be developed by the expert teams and, in a second step, presenting the plans to the popu- lation. The second option was to develop the plan from the bottom up, engaging with all of the groups affected by different aspects of the plan in an open manner. Under the latter, which was the option finally chosen, the main challenge was not simply to involve zens in the ‘concept design’ phase of the plan- ning process, but also in convincing experts of the necessity of having a dialogue zens. In this instance open forums became the main instrument proposed for achieving this dialogue.2 In order to define their number and topics, the participation team asked both experts and the community to identify the most problematic and controversial issues, eventually defining eight key matters of concern. In the next sections, I will discuss in detail two such forums. Before doing so however, it might be worth reflecting on the above- described transformation of hybrid forums into participatory devices for controversy management. As it has become clear, this cannot be simply read as the co-optation of participatory democracy concepts by a private consulting company to serve the interests of big capital. As Anders Blok has pointed out, the key question is rather whether the notion of the hybrid forum deserved to have become no better than a consultancy tool; and whether it is possible forums, do ‘is not necessarily written on the package’, so that they need to be studied by paying attention to the ‘collateral realities’ enacted in and through these devices. In the case of Constitucio´n, one key issue was the partially unspoken and conflictive relation- ship between Arauco and the city (see Farı´as 2015). Arauco’s wood processing plant in Constitu- cio´n is the only one in Chile, and probably in Latin America, that is situated less than 1 kilo- meter from the city center. While partially hidden behind a small hill, it is in constant and direct interaction with the city. The most pervasive source of nuisance and concern for the local population has been the gas emissions and penetrating smells resulting from the pro- cessing of wood pulp. Apart from health hazards, involving an allegedly higher than normal cancer rate, these odors have been one of the main causes of the decline of Constitu- cio´n as a summer resort city. Additionally, the everyday operation of the plant has brought with it increasing road congestion and noise pollution in the city center due to the associated industrial traffic. Yet another controversial issue has involved the plant’s treatment of toxic residuals, as environmental groups have accused the company of discharging these into the ocean at night and causing the death of marine life. Given this controversial history, the consortium created between Arauco and the municipality for planning and managing the reconstruction process was received criti- cally by various neighborhood associations, local unions, environmental activists, citizens and even some municipal officials. In this context of tension and suspicion, one key question was whether Arauco’s pulp mill was to be the subject of an open forum. This possibility had remained a rather unspoken aspect, or blind spot, commissioning of the master plan. The archi- tects, engineers and participation consultants soon realized, however, that the success of the participatory planning process depended upon opening up a discussion about Arauco’s plant. Indeed, during the first 556 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 In spite of this imagining of the city without the plant, it was clear for members of the con- sortium that moving the plant was not under discussion. One situation recorded by a documentary filmmaker makes apparent the power of this politico-economic fact. In a visit to Constitucio´n, Chile’s then-president Sebastia´n Pin˜era was introduced to the recon- struction plans by the manager of the Arauco – Constitucio´n consortium in a public event attended by representatives of Arauco, the Municipality and civic society actors. In the middle of a slide show, Pin˜era asked the presenter whether the plant could be moved out. Not satisfied with a general statement about the non-feasibility of this option, Pin˜era asked how much it would cost. When, after some evasive answers, an Arauco representative eventually mentioned a very high figure, the president reckoned it not possible (Javier Correa, personal com- munication, 17 May 2012). When the open forum on the Arauco plant took place more than a month later, the location of the plant was not really an issue under discussion. At stake rather was only the question of how to improve the relation- ships between the company and the city. Accordingly, during the open forum, one Arauco manager explained to the public some of the previous measures implemented for processing industrial waste and mitigating the smell of wood processing and made some proposals for a new form of conviviality. This should start by organizing guided visits to the plant for the community, which had never had any access to it. It was also suggested that citizens should be integrated into the process of measuring and monitoring smells. Beyond this, the master plan was to include projects that could generate positive external- ities from the plant for the city. The most important project was to install a system of energy recovery in the plant’s refrigeration tower, which would freely supply all public buildings in the city with heat and even an open-air heated public swimming pool— which eventually was only implemented for the swimming pool. A further suggestion she observes that ‘there are many ways of fab- ricating an apparently open situation, where the powers to object and propose are present, but under such conditions that, in fact, the dice are loaded, the forces unequal’. In her view, this is one of the dangers of hybrid forums. Referring to Callon and col- leagues, she observes that the problem is not just that we live in an ‘uncertain world’, in a world shaped by techno-scientific uncertain- ties and risks, but that we live ‘in a dangerous world’ (54). The danger, as we have seen, is the incapacity of a procedural approach to take into account the asymmetries and dynamics of urban assemblages. This has also been observed by Lolive (2006), who stresses that: ‘within a procedural perspective of public action, the minimal fulfilment of some of these criteria suffices to certify the procedure and legitimize any decision passing the same procedure irrespectively decision being constrained by or not’. (159) Pestre (2011) goes even further to suggest that center staging hybrid forums could end up being dangerous for the very idea of techni- cal democracy, for these participation pro- cedures cannot be a substitute for the main achievement of democratic societies, namely, having developed ‘a multiplicity of means for managing disagreements and conflicts and for framing issues: the writing of positive law, executive action, administrative rules, court rulings, call to experts, lobbying, public dem- onstrations, action in the media sphere, etc.’ (360). Moreover, as Marres and Lezaun (2011) suggest, the idea of a hybrid forum ‘revert(s) to an ideal of participation premised on disembeding or disentanglement from material practices [ . . . ] performed in the workplace, the home, nature, the market—in settings and through objects that do not belong to a distinct sphere of rather co-articulate public political with other domains of everyday (496) 558 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 When the park proposal was presented in the open forum, a heated discussion ensued. Interestingly, the debate did not focus much on the park itself, which was almost unani- mously considered ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’, but cen- tered on what was not taken into account in the project, namely, the consequences of building the park for people living at the river- side. The issue was not the mutually reinfor- cing urban relationships that the park would enable, but rather those urban relationships that the park would disable, those forms of urban life that the park would interrupt and render unviable, impossible. Building the park involved expropriating around 100 detached family houses, as well as local fishing facilities and commercial stores. The affected population was mainly composed of poor local fishermen, whose economic–pro- ductive activities depended on their immediate access to the coast, and of rich house owners of the local economic elite. Interestingly, whereas the latter group hired an engineering company to critically assess the park proposal and did not use the open forum to present their critiques, it was the fishermen, or at least some of them, who fiercely presented their opposition during the forum. In their interventions, the fishermen made three major points. The first was that they had been living there for generations and their culture, life and even human dignity depended on staying at the riverside. Just thinking about the possibility of relocating them was insulting. The second point was that it should not be the whole population that decides on what happens there, but rather the fishermen themselves who decide upon how they want to continue living their lives. The third point was that a proposal like this could not be made without clearly specifying what the alternatives are for the people living in the area. Beyond these argu- ments, perhaps the most interesting aspect is the way the fishermen talked, performed their opposition and framed their interactions with the architects and participation experts. They were emotional, furious and confronta- tional. They would refer to the architect who The open forum on the riverside did not conclude with a consensus and it actually poses the question whether a consensus- oriented dialogue among heterogeneous actors can be the goal of such forums. In spite of the efforts by participation consult- ants in framing it as a space of mutual learning and symmetrical dialogue, the fishermen made use of existing asymmetries in technical expertise and design capacities to emphasize the lack of appropriate expert solutions for their situation. Their aim was not to co- create or co-design hand in hand with experts, probably because they also recog- nized that they would not be able to have any influence on the project and more gener- ally, why should they participate in the design of a project that would involve relo- cating them? Thus, interestingly, the asym- metry of these open forums did not necessarily put fishermen in a weak position but rather strengthened their position. From this perspective, the problem with the ‘open forums’ is not that they conceal asymmetries, but that they afford only one type of participation, namely, that of highly educated national citizens, who speak prop- erly, can detach themselves from the issues at stake, justify their claims along public understandings of the common good and are capable of challenging the technical and epistemic assumptions of expert knowledge (M. Tironi 2015). Thereby, open forums (and the notion of technical democracy that inspires them) make absent other publics that engage in other forms of demonstration (M. Tironi 2015). They can even be con- sidered an obstacle to other, perhaps less technical, forms of interaction with lation that had just suffered the fifth largest earthquake ever measured. As with ‘Gino’s lesson on humanity’ (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2004),3 the fishermen’s lesson on politics is that democracy requires more than reinvent- ing ideal speech situations. In the days that followed the forum, the participation team sought a dialogue with the affected groups, especially the fishermen, to make the park possible. As it turned out, 560 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 also ensure that the citizens would have ‘objective information’ regarding the conse- quences of their decision and, most impor- tantly, to ensure that people would come to vote. The latter was indeed a major issue, for it was assumed that only an overwhelm- ing majority for the park would legitimize expropriation: ‘If we don’t make the right don’t get the people we expect, anyway are going to come are from the riverside. So, if we are going to convene 110 guys, they are going to beat the hell out of us.’ Participation consultants designed a plan for ensuring the participation of at least 3000 inhabitants. It involved a week-long voting period, a city-wide communication campaign and radio announcements inviting people to vote as well as free transportation living far from the balloting center. The voting event was also designed to enact a civic ritual, with election precinct monitors, an electoral roll and a ballot box. In addition to this, an information leaflet was widely dis- tributed, which explained that with the fluvial park, hydrological inundations could occur every 25 years instead of every 2 years, tsunami waves would be reduced by up to 40% instead of not being reduced at all and, consequently, residential uses close to the riv- erside would be allowed instead of prohib- ited. The only drawback presented was that the city without the fluvial park would not necessitate the expropriation of approxi- mately 100 private sites in a city of almost 50,000 inhabitants. Eventually, and not sur- prisingly, the fluvial park was approved by almost 90% of citizen votes. This final story suggests that the key demo- cratic challenge is not just related to the pro- cedural rules of a hybrid forum but also to how multiple participatory devices, including the hybrid forum, informal meetings and public voting are articulated with each other. After the open forum on the riverside, the participatory planning process funda- mentally changed its logics from one inspired experts (be they from national citizen associ- ations or NGO representatives) in at stake. But apart from such design issues, the important question involves the performa- tive effect of open forums. What was being done with these open forums? The easy answer would be to imagine them as devices intended to deceive; ideological arte- facts that use the open, direct and participa- tive language of technical democracy to hide the fact that decisions were being made on the basis of cold economic calculations and arrogant expert epistemologies. But the ‘problem’ of hybrid forums is more complex than that. Rather than as deceptive devices, hybrid forums were framed as con- sensual mechanisms aimed at producing decisions about the planning and design of city reconstruction. Thus, if these hybrid forums failed to con- tribute to a democratization of urban exper- tise, this is because they were not exploring and producing uncertainty and making it public but for the consensual man- agement of existing conflicts. These forums were thus far from addressing the challenge of technical democracy, which instead of necessitating a politics of socio-technical consensus, requires, to paraphrase Dewey (1927), a politics of socio-technical imentation (see the introduction to this special feature). The conclusion that we can then derive from the previous story is that the most urgent challenge for hybrid forums is not the symmetrization of knowl- edge regarding uncertain issues and matters of concern, as Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009) would have it, but rather how to collectively manufacture socio-tech- nical uncertainty, how to equip collectives for a swift slowing down of thinking and action. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 562 CITY VOL. 20, NO. 4 formas urbanas en Chile.” Revista Ple´yade 14: 119– 142. Farı´as, Ignacio. 2015. “Sta ¨ Schadstoffen. Materielle Intimita urbaner Dingpolitik.” Berliner Farı´as, Ignacio, and Patricio Flores. State of Exception: Governing in post-27F Chile.” Urban Studies, Doi:0042098015620357. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist 19805.” Socialist Review 80: 65– 107. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Law, John, and Evelyn Ruppert. 2013. Methods: Devices.” Journal (3): 229– 240. Lolive, Jacques. 2006. “Des forums sation des espaces publics.” du Que´bec 50 (140): 151– 171. Marres, Noortje, and Javier Lezaun. Devices of the Public: An Introduction.” society 40 (4): 489–509. McFarlane, Colin. 2011. “Assemblage and Critical Urbanism.” CITY 15 (2): 204– 224. McFarlane, and Steve Graham, eds. Lives. Urban Infrastructure in Context. London: Routledge. urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action (Print) 1470-3629 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20 Ignacio Farías (2016) Devising hybrid forums, City, 20:4, 549-562, DOI: 8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1193998 13 Sep 2016. article to this journal articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccit20 Date: 19 September 2016, At: 13:24 rg/10.1080/13604813.2016.1193998 come to embody the promises and dangers of ‘technical project that, according to Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, of expertise through the sustained collabor- and issue publics on shared matters of concern. In this deployment of hybrid forums as participatory devices after in the city of Constitucio´n, Chile. By carefully describing consequences of said forums, I reflect on three critical ten- processes. Firstly, taking into account the tension forums as a concept and a device, I describe how these company as a tool for managing controversies. Sec- between emergent and procedural dynamics of collaboration, forums confronted for incorporating pre-existing controversies of Constitucio´n. Thirdly, I discuss how what counts as political contested in these forums, looking in detail at how local fish- claim-making that run against the collaborative project by suggesting that the most urgent challenge of hybrid respond to existing uncertainties and matters of participate in the manufacturing of uncertainty. technical democracy, hybrid forums, urban assemblages, increasingly common after contemporary urban disasters—but also as an opportunity to implement hitherto unthinkable policy instruments for steering urban reconstruction and development. In almost every stage of the reconstruction process, political experiments took place that redefined in different, albeit not necessarily coherent ways, what it is to govern, what it is to be governed, what is the role of the public, how to attain the common good, etc. as Taylor & Francis Group This is a very interesting case for assessing the challenge of technical democracy for urban studies, for if there is a concept that has come to embody the promises and dangers in and around the notion of technical democracy, this is precisely the concept of the hybrid forum. The latter term was coined by Callon and Rip (1992) to describe spaces of discussion and negotiation among hetero- geneous actors concerned with the formu- lation of socio-technical norms and further developed, in recent years, by Callon, Las- coumes, and Barthe (2009) to address current democratic challenges at the bound- ary of techno-science, politics and society. A key observation is that the major demo- cratic challenge we are currently facing is not so much related to the expansion of representative democracy, but to the demo- cratization of knowledge production regard- ing science, technology, the environment and other objects of governmental action. For cities, and not just after socio-natural disasters as in the Chilean case, hybrid forums are a promising conceptual inno- vation for grasping current demands for the democratization of urban governance and development. Cities are indeed quite unique sites, in which we often encounter intensive, affective and pervasive entanglements between highly sophisticated techno-scienti- fic arrangements and highly heterogeneous populations intimately living, coping and tin- kering with such infrastructures. In this sense, all city dwellers, and not just the poor and excluded, live infrastructural lives (McFarlane and Graham 2015). This makes apparent the fact that urban politics always involves, in one way or another, a material and infrastructural politics (Barry 2013) and, by extension, that urban democratization requires new forms of socio-technical dem- onstration, representation and experimen- tation. From this perspective, the idea of hybrid forums allows us to grasp the demo- cratic challenge of cities conceived as multi- plicities of assemblages. And yet, by telling and reflecting upon three stories about the hybrid forums of FARI´AS: DEVISING HYBRID FORUMS 551 sociologist with a PhD from the E´cole des hautes e´tudes de sciences sociale and a key intellectual of the Socialist – Christian demo- cratic coalition in government from 1990 to 2010 and again since 2014, published Abierta. Gestio´n de controversias y justifica- ciones. As explained on its back cover, the book introduces ‘a methodology for compa- nies to manage [ . . . ] overflows, and the uncertainty they produce, by means of learn- ing to engage in controversies with directly concerned social actors’ (E. Tironi 2011). The book, written in a lucid and entertaining tone, introduces managers to some basic notions of actor-network theory and the sociology of justifications, to then focus on the concept and the development of a meth- odology for hybrid forums, renamed in the book as ‘open forums’. While such method- ology could certainly be useful for govern- mental offices, public institutions, citizen associations and social movements, these are not the audiences the book addresses. Indeed, this is a book written for firms, man- agers and corporations. Interestingly, the book mostly relies on consultancy work done for a company involved in such public controversies, Celu- losa Arauco y Constitucio´n, mostly known as Arauco, one of the world’s largest wood pulp and forestry companies operating several plants in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. During the last 15 years, Arauco has been at the center of public controversies and court trials concerning several environ- mental disasters. First in 1999, and then again in 2007, thousands of fish died in the Mataquito River seemingly due to waste- water from a nearby pulp mill. In 2004 and 2005, thousands of black-necked swans sud- denly died or migrated away from a nature sanctuary in Valdivia. Arauco’s pulp mill, installed upriver shortly before, was blamed and the company agreed to pay compensation to local tourism companies to avoid further legal actions. After introducing these and other examples, E. Tironi explains that in the old days corporate strategic communi- cation involved mobilizing technical for defining what should count as a ‘good’ hybrid forum. These include implementation criteria, such as ‘equality’ among participants, the ‘transparency’ of the debate and the ‘clarity’ of the rules and goal of the process, as well as criteria concerning the degree of dialogism, such as the ‘intensity’ of lay – expert collaboration, the ‘openness’ to emer- gent and non-institutionalized groups, and, finally, the ‘quality’ of dialogue. In yet a further step, Callon and colleagues use these criteria to evaluate existing participatory methods, such as focus or discussion groups, public inquiries, consensus confer- ences and citizen juries. While pointing to the latter two as the ones achieving the highest degree of dialogism, they note the need to resist the temptation of looking for the perfect procedure and to engage in a con- stant revision and design of new ones. Hence, hybrid forums are conceived here as devices, as ‘patterned teleological arrangements’ (Law and Ruppert 2013, 229) that do certain things and not others. More specifically, hybrid forums appear here as ‘devices of the public’, which is to say, patterned teleological arrangements that ‘in a particular situation come to play a role in the enactment of public participation’ (Marres and Lezaun 2011, 493). Implicitly recognizing this tension between the concept and the device, E. Tironi proposes ‘open forums’ as a way to describe the manage- rial devices created to deal with socio-technical controversies, emphasizing that these differ from hybrid forums in one key aspect, namely, that they do not simply emerge as a diffuse space in between the actors involved in a controversy, but are planned, institutiona- lized and formalized. This implies, firstly, that open forums follow rules, protocols and pro- cedures to ensure their hybrid composition, the symmetrical stance of participants and their shared moral commitment to a collective and open exploration of possible states of the world. Secondly, since open forums are planned and institutionalized spaces, the con- troversial topics or issues to be addressed should be first defined in what is called a FARI´AS: DEVISING HYBRID FORUMS 553 The second consultancy job, which involves the case that will be discussed in more detail, arose unexpectedly after the earthquake and tsunami of 27 February 2010. The small city of Constitucio´n, where Arauco has its oldest pulp mill, was heavily damaged. In the media, Constitucio´n became a national symbol of the destruction, especially given the high death toll due to the tsunami and the destruction of almost 70% of the urban fabric. As mentioned above, it also became a much-discussed example of the urban policy innovations in the reconstruc- tion process that the government fostered and supported. Indeed, less than three weeks after the tragedy, and under the auspices of the National Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, the municipality of Constitucio´n signed a private – public alliance with Arauco for the organization and management of the urban reconstruction planning process (for a detailed analysis, see Farı´as and Flores 2015). Arauco’s participation involved pro- viding the entire funding for the planning process of a new master plan and executing some of the planned projects. This alliance did not simply emerge after the earthquake. Since 2003 – 2004, and as a consequence of the various socio-environmental controver- sies mentioned before, Arauco initiated a process of changing its relationships with the communities and territories where its plants are located. Tironi Asociados played a key role in recommending and supporting this process, which even led to the creation of a new Division of Social Responsibility and Public Affairs. In Constitucio´n, Arauco began to support the municipality and citizen associations in many different pro- jects. In 2009, shortly before the earthquake, Arauco contracted the architectural office Elemental for the design of a new Cultural Center for Constitucio´n, which the munici- pality would then submit for available public funding for its construction. After the earthquake, such punctual collaborations with the municipality radically changed in scale. The Constitucio´n– Arauco consortium to distinguish analytically between ‘progress- ive’ and ‘problematic’ deployments of hybrid forums, between deployments that contrib- ute to the realization of technical democracy and others that might work against that goal. The discussion so far has suggested that what makes a key difference is not whether hybrid forums are ‘diffuse’ or ‘commis- sioned’, to use Merkx’s (2008) distinction (see also the introduction). This is probably too abstract a distinction for making sense of most empirical cases, which find them- selves somewhere between the completely spontaneous and the totally organized. The next two stories about the hybrid forums of Constitucio´n suggest that it is rather the articulation of these public assemblies with existing urban assemblages, as well as their varying capacities to host heterogeneous forms of political representation, that has a more significant impact on the democratiza- tion potential of hybrid forums. citi- 3. The plant: which assembly for these urban assemblages? with citi- The next story about these open forums poses a different set of questions regarding the capacities of different urban actors to define what becomes a controversial issue and in which way. This is an extremely important issue, as it invites us to think about the com- plicated ways in which hybrid forums relate to the urban assemblages shaping the city; assemblages that, as McFarlane (2011, 208) has noted, are ‘structured, hierarchized and narrativized through profoundly unequal relations of power, resource and knowledge’. Indeed, the different capacities of hybrid forums for functioning as spaces for the democratization of urban expertise and plan- ning cannot be purported to be based simply on the procedural rules shaping such devices, but need to be studied in relation to how various urban assemblages define the con- ditions for hybrid forums to unfold. As Law and Ruppert (2013, 230) rightly point out, what devices, and in our case hybrid FARI´AS: DEVISING HYBRID FORUMS 555 encounters of citizen organizations and union representatives with the participation consultants (who were called the ‘Arauco people’ by many local actors), the former expressed skepticism and suspicion about the entire participation process as involving an image campaign oriented at naturalizing the presence of Arauco’s plant in the city. Some local union leaders even threatened to riot, protest and undermine the participatory planning process. Interestingly, when the participation con- sultants first proposed organizing an open forum about the relationship between the plant and the city, Arauco’s reaction was to argue that the master plan was for the city, not for the plant, which strictly speaking is outside the city limit. It was only when con- sultants ensured Arauco managers that the people would not campaign against or vote to close the plant that Arauco’s managers agreed to participate in the open forum. There were, indeed, many reasons for assum- ing that the pulp mill plant would not be radi- cally questioned by the people attending the forum. The first, and most obvious, was that the local economy heavily depends upon it. Beyond this, in an early participatory exercise for envisioning the future of Constitucio´n, participants had agreed upon considering for- estry activity as one key aspect defining the city’s identity as a wood industry town. Indeed, the only issue raised by the commu- nity in the first open forum that concerned the plant was taxes and the fact that Arauco paid the largest amount of taxes in a different municipality. This difficult relationship of dependency between the citizens and the plant is well expressed in the idea that the best solution would be for the plant to just move a few kilometers away from the city: in the ‘Let Arauco create an industrial camp and go away from the city, at least 5 kilometres, just as the rest of sawmills that surround the city, at a respectful distance. We would all win, including Arauco.’ (Anonymous comment in http://www.presconstitucion.cl/noticias/ foro-de-arauco-en-el-pres/) was that the company should take a leading role in the constitution of an urban – regional wood production cluster that could enhance the city’s competitive capacities. Arauco should not just maintain its role as a major source of employment and wealth but also invest in the creation of new tourist circuits, information centers and museums on forest resources, wood production and products, thereby reinforcing urban and regional iden- tity (see Farı´as 2015). There are various interesting elements in this story. The first is that the open forum about the plant took place when the issue about its location had already been settled. A problematization of the plant had been ongoing since immediately after the earth- quake: community representatives, environ- mental activists and union leaders had expressed their dissatisfaction with the plant; participation consultants had questioned whether citizens would vote against it and had discussed the issue with Arauco represen- tatives and the architects and urban planners involved in the process; Arauco’s experts had calculated the possible cost of relocation; and even the Chilean president had posed the question at a public event at which civic society representatives were present. Interest- ingly, the process through which the issue was settled, if it ever was really open to discus- sion, did not involve any open forums but was rather based on a statement of economic and political ‘facts’, such as the dependency of the local economy on the plant or the exces- sive cost of relocation. A second interesting element of the previous story is that, after the relocation option was declared impossible, the open forum focused exclusively on how to design a common world in which the city and the plant could coexist. Thereby, it maintained the very distinction between facts and values that it aimed to supersede. The open forum asked only ‘how’ we could live together, assuming a fixed definition of ‘who’ we are. The case thus makes apparent how urban assemblages might constrain whether and how issues enter public assemblies. This is what Stengers (2007, 54) is alluding to when FARI´AS: DEVISING HYBRID FORUMS 557 4. The park: expert reason and urban facts If the latter story invites us to take into account urban assemblages constraining the unfolding of hybrid forums, as well as sites of decision-making and participation outside the forum, this last section focuses on the unfolding of participation in such forums. In the following story about the planning of an anti-tsunami park, the most important urban project developed for Con- stitucio´n, two tensions potentially jeopardiz- ing the promise of technical democracy become evident. The first of these is the lack of articulation of a consensus-oriented dialogue with antagonistic forms of partici- pation, the second is the movement from par- ticipatory to representative democratic devices. The city of Constitucio´n is located on the through southern side of the Rio Maule estuary. of that the procedure Tsunami waves entered the city through the estuary heavily destroying residential houses on the riverside. Hence, the most important project to be developed was a tsunami mitiga- tion work that could allow further residential uses in the risk zone. The proposal, which was presented by the architects in an open forum focusing on the riverside, was to trans- form the very first line of land into what was called a ‘fluvial park’; a park with high and robust trees and a especially designed topo- graphy that could effectively diminish the intensity and velocity of tsunami waves. In addition, the ‘fluvial park’ would help to solve key city problems identified by plan- ners and citizens, such as counteracting the deficit of green and leisure areas, enhancing the unique relationship of the city with the river, solving the frequent inundation of the inner city by designing the park as a flood zone, and mitigating the problem of inner- city industrial traffic (as it would incorporate a new coastal highway into its design). Thus, action, but the park might become the cornerstone for a activity practice’. new way of composing city life (cf. Tironi and Farı´as 2015). presented the park proposal as ‘young man’, accusing him of knowing nothing about the sea and arguing that, when making such pro- posals, architects were following their own professional interests. Further, the fishermen present at the forum would not enter into technical discussions. Their goal, it seemed, was not advancing the democratization of expertise, but rather opposing and dismissing technical expertise in favor of other values. They would even counteract the logic of dia- logue and consensus that was supposed to underlie the open forum and, on occasion, threatened to simply leave the room (which one of them actually did, although he waited just outside for a few moments listen- ing to the discussions only to come back in again to make another intervention). Equally interesting was the performance of the architects presenting the proposal and one of the participation consultants moderating the forum. The first did not react to any of the provocative comments by the fishermen and other citizens and only intervened to explain technical issues and/or ask for more technical details about a particular claim. Beyond that, the archi- tects repeated one simple mantra: ‘None of these ideas are final plans and we present these to you to incorporate your opinions into our final proposal.’ The moderator was the one dealing more directly with the fishermen’s confrontations. Three things were particularly noteworthy. The first was the use of the pronoun ‘we’ to remind the forum participants that the planning team is not the central government or the munici- pality, but rather a technical team hired by a consortium to develop a master plan with the people of Constitucio´n. The second was a repeated appeal, at the beginning and during the forum, to think from the perspec- tive of the city and the common good, leaving aside particular interests of affected groups. The third was confronting the fish- ermen, at the most critical moments, with the question: ‘OK, we understand the point of your critique, but what is your proposal? What is your proposal for a solution?’ FARI´AS: DEVISING HYBRID FORUMS 559 they were prepared to accept a relocation as long as the housing alternative was better than what they had, the new location would be close to the riverside and the well-off population residing at the riverside would also be expropriated. This was indeed a major point for the fishermen: ‘either we all leave or nobody leaves’, which indicates a greater concern about class privileges than about technical democracy. However, despite the agreement, the fate of the park was not yet sealed. The citizen participation plan foresaw that citizens of Constitucio´n should decide democratically on which urban projects should be realized with the available funding. This meant that the park and other projects were to be put to a public vote. Unprioritized projects would depend on future investment formulas involving private actors and, obviously, risked never being built. A few days before the vote, in one of the last meetings among architects, urban engineers and participation consultants, a discussion took place as to whether it was professionally and ethically correct to give citizens the possibility of rejecting the park. According to one of the participation consultants, the architects brought up the issue by posing two questions: ‘On the one hand, [ . . . ] whether it was responsible to put to the vote a project that, to start with, is the backbone of the whole plan [ . . . ] On the other hand, it was an argument about responsibility, like an ethics of responsibility. Considering that the mitigation work was important, then “we” couldn’t put to the vote something that is key to the life of the people.’ a popu- For the participation consultants, this was a risk that should have been accepted. There was a public agreement with the community regarding the voting on all projects and, beyond this, the whole participation process had been about putting into question a tra- ditional model in which responsibility is del- egated to experts. The discussion led to a compromise, namely, to put the park to the vote but to in direct democracy to one based on repre- sentative democracy, from the opening up of dialogical spaces to the management of electoral campaigns, from the involvement of affected and concerned publics to that of an abstract political community and, finally, from a search of consensus and compromises on complex socio-technical issues to the search for a majority that could legitimize a moves and we technical decision. While such moves could the ones that be understood as enabling the institutional the 70 guys checks and balances that, according to Pestre (2011), characterize good democracies, the way that movement was steered towards a specific result suggests that the discussions enabled by the open forum remained inconsequential. 5. The ‘problem’ of uncertainty for people Looking back at these stories, it becomes evident that the open forums held in Constitu- cio´n were not capable of exploring the complex dependencies persisting between Arauco and the city dwellers, as well as over- coming the knowledge asymmetries between professional experts and affected groups. Such dependencies and asymmetries remained untouched not simply due to the means avail- able to some actors to set up an open forum, hire expert teams and thus frame the discus- sion in a specific way. This was rather due to the unevenly distributed capacities for con- testing what should count as a fact (be this of an economic or environmental nature) and for exploring alternative definitions of the urban common world. There are many poss- ible reasons for why this came to be the case. An important one involved the design of these forums, that is, the fact that, given the great time constraints imposed by the emer- gency situation, these were held only once for each of these controversial issues. This sig- nificantly constrained the possibility of sus- tained collaborative work between the various stakeholders. Another constraint was the exclusive focus on citizen participation, missing the opportunity of inviting other FARI´AS: DEVISING HYBRID FORUMS 561 Notes the issues 1 See http://www.foroabierto.cl/que-es-foro-abierto/ (accessed 1 January 2016). 2 The participation plan also included 45 sectorial forums, 50 ad hoc meetings with neighbors, 2 binding citizen voting rounds, apart from permanent instances of participation. 3 Gino is a patient with muscular dystrophy, who refused medicine when the disease first appeared, as well as refused to participate in patients’ associations or to be concerned with the scientific explanation of his disease. Moreover, Gino’s refusals are not articulated in a discourse that could be expressed in a forum or even reconstructed by means of an in-depth interview. To interview Gino is to place him in a context that cannot but produce a silent subject, without opinions and clear positions. Gino’s lesson on humanity, Callon and Rabeharisoa argue, is his subtle but powerful denial of the free-willed, autonomous and responsible subject and the morality implicit in medicine, genetics and patient networks. Gino’s humanity is not even that of an individual that actively resists a subject position but one that accepts a distributed and entangled position attached to all sorts of other actors (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2004). devised for References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Arauco. 2010. “Memoria Annual 2010.” Accessed Jan- uary 1, 2016. http://www.arauco.cl/_file/file_ 3624_memoria20arauco202010.pdf. exper- Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. 2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Callon, Michel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. 2004. “Gino’s Lesson on Humanity: Genetics, Mutual Entanglements and the Sociologist’s Role.” Economy and Society 33 (1): 1 –27. Callon, Michel, and Arie Rip. 1992. “Humains, Non- Humains: Morale d’une Coexistence.” In La Terre Outrage´e. Les Experts sont Formel!, edited by J. Theys, and B. Kalaoram, 140–156. Paris: Autrement. Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe´lix Guattari. 1994. What is Phil- osophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt. Farı´as, Ignacio. 2014a. “Improvising a Market, Making a Model: Social Housing Policy in Chile.” Economy and Society 43 (3): 346–369. Farı´as, Ignacio. 2014b. “Planes maestros como cosmo- gramas: la articulacio´n de fuerzas ocea´nicas y Merkx, Femke. 2008. “Organizing Responsibilities for Novelties in Medical Genetics: Dynamics and Pro- dtisches Leben von und mit ductivity of Mutual Positioning in Hybrid Forums.” ¨ t als Einschra ¨ nkung PhD Thesis. Twente: University of Twente. Blaetter 69: 70– 83. Pestre, Dominique. 2011. “The Politics of Hybrid Forums.” 2015. “A Different In De´bordements: Me´langes offerts a` Michel Callon, Urban Reconstruction edited by Madeleine Akrich, Yannick Barthe, Fabian Muniesa, and Philippe Mustar, 357–368. Paris: Presses des Mines. Stengers, Isabelle. 2007. “La Proposition Cosmopoli- Feminism in the tique.” In L’e´mergence des cosmopolitiques, edited by Jacques Lolive, and Olivier Soubeyran, 45– 68. Paris: How to Bring the La De´couverte. Tironi, Eugenio. 2011. Abierta. Gestio´n de controversias y justificaciones. Santiago de Chile: Uqbar Editores. “The Social life of Tironi, Manuel. 2015. “Disastrous Publics: Counter- of Cultural Economy 6 enactments in Participatory Experiments.” Science, Technology & Human Values 40 (4): 564–587. hybrides a` l’esthe´ti- Tironi, Manuel, and Ignacio Farı´as. 2015. “Building a Cahiers de ge´ographie Park, Immunising Life: Environmental Management and Radical Asymmetry.” Geoforum 66: 167– 175. 2011. “Materials and Economy and Ignacio Farı´as is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture and the Munich 2015. Infrastructural Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) of the Technical University of Munich. Email:

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