Abstract
Abstract Urban regeneration has been an ongoing process in many cities for decades. It has experienced various changes in terms of the main driving force, with public engagement becoming more and more important. One of the ways for communities to get involved in urban transformation is through participation in urban planning. Local communities are considered as partners in urban design processes, and in many countries their role in planning and design is defined by industry regulations. Still, one question is important – is public participation a formal tool or does it have an influence on planning and how it impacts decision making. Along with community involvement in planning processes, participatory budgeting has been developed as a public participatory approach in recent years. This gives a chance for inhabitants to participate in the budgetary decision-making process. The aim of this study is to analyse whether participatory budgeting, which is mainly municipal-led urban activism, answers the real needs of inhabitants in terms of urban regeneration. The interests of formal urban activism are defined and compared to the interests of informal urban activism actions, correlation and gaps are defined.
Highlights
Urban regeneration has become an important urban policy issue in the 1980s [1]
The aim of this study is to analyse formal urban regeneration projects realized using the participatory budgeting tool and informal urban activism, define topics of interest in both cases as well as geographical distribution and define the gap between interests accomplished with governmental support and the interests of informal urban activists
Analysis of two participatory budgeting models showed that the Riga City Council has a leading role in one of them, determining the types of financed projects
Summary
Urban regeneration has become an important urban policy issue in the 1980s [1]. It is an alternative to new urbanization and allows to transform and upgrade existing places [2]. Participatory processes are intended to force understanding of needs and wishes of local inhabitants by empowering local community and drawing local knowledge in the design and planning. The basic idea of those informal actions is that citizen rights to use and access the city space “must be delinked from land ownership or the imperatives of urban capital, and instead linked to urban occupancy and participation” [7]. The existence of both approaches in many countries shows that the official participatory tools do not accomplish some citizen demands in terms of public open space quality, accessibility, quality of urban life, etc. The aim of this study is to analyse formal urban regeneration projects realized using the participatory budgeting tool and informal urban activism, define topics of interest in both cases as well as geographical distribution and define the gap between interests accomplished with governmental support and the interests of informal urban activists
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