The Role of Community Involvement in Urban Planning – the European and the National Experience

Abstract

The study gives an explanation of the increasing importance of community involvement in the practice of urban planning and regeneration in Europe and in Hungary. To define the problem field the study uses a critical realist model and analyses the man-environment relation in the urban space. By abstracting the dynamism of urban space the model highlights the changes relative to the former organic relationship of people and their built environment and points out the ways it is re-established in a top-down manner by the mechanisms. The paper also provides examples for the regulation, general practice, success and failure of community involvement and participation.

The paper calls the attention to the weak interactions and activities of the mechanisms (influencing man-environment relations), which could be improved the make community participation more efficient and to the benefit of all in the future of urban spaces.