From Regulation to Mediation: The Ecology of Normativities in an Urban Participatory Budgeting Project

Abstract

This article researches the ecology of the normativity (which can be defined as heteroge neous norms that do not form a system) of an urban participatory budgeting project. For this pur pose, the project of a pump-track and street skate-park, implemented with the help of the participatory budgeting project “Your Budget ” in Saint Petersburg is reconstructed. A case-study is used as a research method. The study focuses on three groups of documents: documents created by the authors of the pump track and skate park initiative; documents that regulate the proj ect “Your Budget ” or focus on the rules of its realization; and doc uments that are subject to the general regulations of urban proj ects. Using actor-network theory, we examine how the quasi-subjects and quasi-objects of modern Russian cities are co-produced within the complex ecology of the normatives of the urban participa tory budgeting project and how their characteristics, competenc es, and scale are changed. The re sults show that the material ele ments of the urban space under study and the social group of its users were constructed in the same process. In conclusion, we propose a discourse on the mediation of urban projects as an alternative to a discourse on regulation, which allows a better description of the socio-material democratiza tion of Russian cities.