- Out-institutional Participation of Inhabitants in the planning Process for the Reconstruction of inner City Areas of Novi Sad    94 kb by    Simeunčević , Sanja | simsanja@eunet.yu    Short Outline This paper examines ways how inhabitants can influence planning processes, although their opinion about living space has not been taken into account by local institutions. It further examines ways to overcome bureaucracy and power obstacles in an attempt to protect urban quality. Abstract Participation is essential part of good planning and insurance of plans implementation. What happens when participation has not been done correctly during the planning process, when it has been tried deliberately to avoid participation of one group of stakeholders? This work explores what are the left possibilities for that group to tell their needs and vision of urban plan when bureaucracy is the obstacle to participations. It explore does the possibility to influence planning process exists outside the institutions and the ways obliged by the law. The case study for this research is plan for reconstruction of Almaški kraj-inner city area of Novi Sad, Serbia. Real communication and consensus has not been a part of planning process for Almaški kraj and not all interested groups have been included in participation. Short term interests, representing the interests of developers and investors, were the base of the plan and not strategic thinking for important old city area. Needs and wishes of inhabitants and users of space have been neglected. Their remarks aiming for protection of inherited life and urban qualities corrupted institutions tried to ignore and excluded them from planning process. This produced dissatisfaction in local community which looked for other ways to put a pressure on government to hear their vision for the space-ways outside of the institutions. This works analyzes these ways and their influence on reconstruction plan, and why they were needed. The result of analyzes shows that the more taken out-institutional ways of participation have been public and media covered the better affect on planning institutions they had. Local community vision collected support of broaden citizens group and a range of experts of deferent fields, but the only real result was stopping of planning process by government, and not the change of base idea of reconstruction plan. The conclusion shows that without true change of law and inert institutions the domination of powerful groups in planning process is hard to change and real participation is out of reach. Keywords participation, inhabitants, local community, out-institutional struggle, protection of urban qualities Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper