How Can Social Networking Sites Empower the Grassroots in Urban Planning?

Conflicts and power struggles in urban planning have increasingly shifted to digital platforms. Social networking sites, as emerging socio-technical systems, have greatly influenced power relations in planning practices in recent years (Lin, 2022). Public authorities and urban planners utilize them as digital tools to steer and transform urban planning processes and outcomes (Williamson and Ruming, 2020). They are also used by elites and professionals to challenge governments’ decisions and show the potential to be an alternative pathway to more inclusive planning (Deng et al., 2015). However, there is little research on whether and how social media empowers the grassroots in planning practices. There is also a lack of understanding of how power can be exercised through this digital platform. This study bridges this gap by examining whether and how social networking sites empower the grassroots to challenge the planning authority in planning practice. As a case study, it takes grassroots environmental activism - the Big Banyan Tree controversy in Guangzhou, China. This research develops a new methodology that combines social network analysis and discourse analysis to reveal the influence of social media on citizen empowerment in urban planning. First, we collected extensive digital data from a leading social media platform in China (Weibo). Second, we apply social network analysis (SNA) to model the information flows and interactions between different actors in the case study. We use community detection to measure several virtual communities that are formed through the social media platform. We also identify the relations between different communities and their impacts on power relations in planning practice. Through SNA and community detection, we are able to measure “networked power” generated by social networking sites (Castells, 2011, p 774). Third, we analyze how planning issues are framed and discussed in the networked public sphere of the virtual community. We find that the grassroots strategically uses “discursive legitimacy” (Purdy, 2012, p 410) as a power source to challenge governments’ decisions. The results indicate that social media can assist the grassroots in reshaping power relations with local governments and empower citizens who cannot participate in planning practices through traditional participatory methods. In the absence of explicit elites, grassroots participants can still challenge planning decisions through network power and discourse legitimacy, even though such challenges hint at new power inequalities. The study shows that social media, as a new networked public sphere, provided dissidents with the ability to articulate and organize public discourse. This also allows the mass media (e.g., newspapers) and NGOs to participate in the network and influence planning controversies as well. In addition, it appears that local authorities in China deal with controversies on social media with greater caution rather than simply resorting to online surveillance tactics to suppress discourse.