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). n 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.

Authors (2)