‘participation’ is a horribly overloaded term, i’m hesitant to employ it here. lets just say that one of the themes that stuck out for me had to do with citizen involvement in urban planning, governance, and management. this of course is well-trod ground for urban studies, but it seems to me that several of the papers managed to problematize it in new ways. among the more productive questions included the extent to which citizen involvement is officially sanctioned, whether it occurs as part of planning process or emerges from an established urban context, what are the various mechanisms (technical and social) through which it occurs, and how it is structured (i.e. who gets to participate, etc).