Abstract Summary
The challenge of climate change, a global existential issue, has prompted lively academic discussions and practice. In this context, this research explores the complex connection between urban climate resilience and public engagement by analysing the growing body of literature on participation and participatory platforms used in urban climate resilience projects. Through an examination of scholarly literature and platforms, the present study illustrates the shifting arena of public involvement in climate resilience. The need to empower citizens to participate in city-making, environmental policy-making, and sustainable behaviours is becoming more crucial. Moreover, to overcome the messy problems - limited representation, conflicting stakeholder interests, power imbalances etc. - of urban planning and design processes, public participation plays an important role since it provides increased diversity of perspectives, localised knowledge, improved legitimacy, enhanced decision-making, and increased capacity to implement plans. By encouraging public involvement, governments and institutions can obtain diverse solutions, tackle climate challenges specific to communities, and promote the approval of climate-related policies. Although emerging literature exists on this topic, practical perspectives, in the context of participation platforms, remain open for further investigation and discussion. While these platforms aim to support community engagement, their current methods often result in tokenistic engagement and a failure to empower diverse voices. Herein, this research aims to highlight the numerous examples and formations of public participation in urban climate resilience and discuss its crucial role in shaping a sustainable future through digital platforms that facilitate participation. From this critical view, to map the above-mentioned perspectives, this article will conceptualise the current research and practice agenda of urban climate resilience through the lens of public participation. Positioning itself at the interface of research and practice, this research will evaluate the public participation platforms by decoding platform components and participation methodologies. In doing so, it aims to provide a comprehensive understanding through the analysis of the contemporary ecosystem of participation. Methodologically, the study will employ topic modelling to conduct a systematic literature review by examining the publications from the Web of Science database between 2000 and 2023 and a mapping of current platforms by analysing thematically. This modelling approach applies semantic structures in a text to comprehend unstructured data without the necessity of pre-defined labels or training data. One could argue that this methodology could establish a systematic outlook by deriving from prior studies to contribute new research and practice. With the input from the literature and platform analysis, this research aims to map the design requirements of digital participation platforms towards more inclusive, responsive, and transformative frameworks to improve the efficacy of urban climate resilience studies. Thus, the current state of the art in public participation will be comprised through theoretical and practical approaches.
