Sabrina Moretto: User expertise: a new basis for consultation – application to urban travel

The rise of a ‘participatory imperative’ is driving a renewal of public action and opening up the decision-making system to all stakeholders. Users are thus encouraged to get involved in order to broaden the pool of available knowledge and to have their perspectives taken into account on the basis of their user expertise. Aiming to understand this renewal and to define the place and role played by users within these participatory bodies, we have structured this thesis around the figure of a ‘competent user’. In other words, an actor capable of co-producing public action and sharing their user knowledge.

Our analysis of two participatory schemes, drawn from the field of urban transport, first enabled us to highlight the concrete impacts of user participation on the solutions and directions adopted for the project under discussion. We then examined these approaches in the light of the principles of collective design applied in the fields of industrial engineering and management sciences. Finally, we demonstrated that in order to establish collective public action based on the development of user expertise, three conditions must be met: legitimisation, formalisation and implementation.