- Spurring the community involvement in planning - lessons from post-socialist cities   489 kb by    Lorens, Piotr & Kamrowska-Zaluska, Dorota | plorens@pg.gda.pl    Short Outline Community involvement in planning in case of post-socialist cities was until recently almost non-existent. But in recent years the development of demand for more public participation is dramatically increasing. This needs the creation of new types of planning tools as well as the introduction of innovative techniques of conducting the community dialogue. Abstract Public participation and community involvement in planning processes is – in general – not a new topic for contemporary planners. But in many parts of the world – including the post-socialist countries like Poland or Russia – we can still face the lack of understanding of importance of proper community involvement in planning and development processes. Situation in these countries is significantly different from both highly-developed countries (where we can observe many forms of participation and the need for this is in principle commonly accepted by all stakeholders) and developing ones (where the key issues are frequently associated with providing basic infrastructure or upgrading the very unprivileged areas). The post-socialist countries are frequently regarded as relatively well developed and can be characterized as “rich” from the perspective of many other ones, but in fact they are still on the fast track on the way towards redevelopment of its urban structures. This is accompanied by rapid and frequently disordered urbanization, which is happening in the realities of “liberal model” of spatial development. At the same time the local communities get very much interested in the development process and are looking forward towards being accepted as equal or even key partner for other stakeholders. This does not come along with the ability of discussing the problems and dilemmas of spatial development - and this is both the problem of local municipalities, interested local communities and other stakeholders – like i.e. developers and investors. Therefore, we have to face the situation in which the partners are not ready to discuss the development and planning issues, which partly comes from the present liberal paradigm and partly from lack of conducting the public discourse in general. In this case planners have to take the leading role in the process and come with the innovative – at least in post-soviet realities – planning tools and techniques, allowing introduction of the public participation process in a way acceptable for all key stakeholders. One of these are the “planning workshops”, similar to known in the highly developed countries “charrettes”, which allow discussing the PROBLEM and which prevent jumping directly to the discussion of pros and cons of some proposed solutions (which usually are unacceptable for some of the partners/stakeholders) and – in result – prevent unnecessary miscommunication and sometimes even public quarrels. The paper will discuss the Polish and Russian experiences in this respect – meaning the outcomes of some attempts towards implementing these “planning workshops” in the post-socialistic realities. It will be developed on the experience of the author, who was personally involved in preparing and developing of these workshops for a number of municipalities and problem areas. On this basis some more general conclusions regarding the applicability of this methodology will be drawn and presented. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper