Evaluating community participation effectiveness in landscape architectural design and planning: with special reference to passaiyoor and rasavinthottam parks, Jaffna

Abstract

The majority of Sri Lankan context projects were planned and developed less prioritizing the community's actual needs. As a result of this top-down approach, when it comes to execution, there are certain disagreements between the government and the community. Many contemporary planning theorists acknowledge that public participation in the planning process can produce or create credibility, trust, and commitment. Even though a fairly modest number of landscape architectural projects have been carried out in Sri Lanka incorporating community participation, the effective integration of such data into public landscape design and development is yet to be explored. Therefore, this paper investigates the effectiveness of community participation in the design and planning process of Passaiyoor Park and Rasavinthottam Park in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The methods of data collection include interviews, questionnaires, documents, and project reports. The effectiveness of public participation was evaluated by a toolkit of indicators derived from the literature. (indicators such as Administration, Information, Objectives, Stage, Targeting, Technique, Legitimacy, Common values, Fairness and equality, Equal power, and responsible leadership). The research outcomes were able to portray that the overall satisfaction level of the community participation process is 75% in Rasavinthottam Park and 77% in Passaiyoor Park, while the overall satisfaction level about the project outcome is 45% in Rasavinthottam Park and 22% in Passaiyoor Park. In fact, evidence that the execution of the community’s vision in the real ground seems to be lacking. Therefore, without putting pre-initiated projects (by the government) into action, identify the problems that are most relevant to the public and pay attention to engage the community early and throughout the process, not only for one stage, and make sure the process is transparent to all the community and the outcome of the project is their real need.