PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN THE 1970s CHANNEL TUNNEL DEBATE PART Ⅰ: The Defeat of a Traffic Tunnel'

摘要

Over the past decade or so, a series of concerns has been raised about the value of public participation in technology development, within circles generally supportive of the concept as well as the practice. Informed analysts have focused especially on the tangible outcomes of public participation, often in reference to transport projects. This article takes up the forms and outcomes of public participation in the Channel Tunnel in the 1970s. Part Ⅰ concentrates on the forms of public participation. I show how the Channel Tunnel became an object of public participation, a newly coined term at the time. Employing thick description, I reconstruct a key public debate about the Channel Tunnel system design. Participants carefully set out why the tunnel design on offer―what I dub the 'Traffic Tunnel'―would be culturally unacceptable both in terms of the more general context of the limits-to-growth debate, as well as in the more specific context of the Garden of England, where the tunnel would be situated. In 1975 the Traffic Tunnel project was cancelled. The Traffic Tunnel may have been defeated, but public participation had a second important consequence. Part Ⅱ of the article takes up how public debate produced a culturally acceptable alternative to the Traffic Tunnel―what I call the 'Garden Tunnel'. In particular I show how public debate generated not only the usual calls for protest, regulation as well as compensation, but also culturally acceptable design outcomes.