Bassem Asseh, the Deputy Mayor of Nante, the 6th largest city in France, visited Tainan on Oct. 14 and made a conversation with staffs responsible for open decision-making policy from REDC, Bureau of Urban Planning, and Bureau of Cultural Affairs of Tainan City Government in Willow House. With abundant experience accumulated over a decade, Mr. Asseh had a heated discussion with participants who also raised their questions actively.
The gathering began with two brief presentations related to two processing open decision-making projects, Fei Yen New Village Urban Regeneration and the Selection of the New City Hall Location. Mr. Asseh also questioned about the way of holding citizen forum implementation, sampling method, and the design of questionnaire. Afterwards, he showed his compliments on the sampling methods which complies with equal and diverse principles.
There was a case similar to New Administrative Centre development in Nante, with only one location available, however. Despite that, Nante citizens still discussed the out-looking and scale of the building. Mr. Asseh pointed out that the issues of citizen participation should be “How to do” instead of “Yes or No” question. Deputy Mayor Asseh also described the promotion of citizen participation as unknown challenges and endless experiments that differed from his former job with well-built SOP. In the end, Mr. Asseh encouraged and expected civil servants of Tainan to promote citizen participation consistently.