**6. Conclusions**

In the field of land-use planning, civic participation provides space for residents to be significantly involved, but engagemen<sup>t</sup> requires social cohesion and its strengthening [72]. Residents can be involved in terms of their own individual intentions, for example, if they want to change the usability of land so that they can build what they plan. Additionally, they can influence projects in their immediate vicinity that may affect their property, as well as general and complex intentions, which relate to a vision for the future in the sense of "where we are and where we are going", and in this respect, a plurality of opinions is important. The participation of citizens in the vision for the future, which will be ensured by the appropriate development of the land-use plan, is suitable due to the fact that citizens thus become participants in the project, which, from a territorial point of view, will greatly affect the functioning of the municipality in the future. On the positive side of civic participation, citizens can "build their place" through it, and if they identify with the land-use plan and adopt it as their own, they are likely to be more inclined to be satisfied with it. However, in order for this to work, it has been confirmed that it is usually necessary to take collective action and take steps towards social learning [71], and the profiling and follow-up of the leader (Lamker) can be a significant driving force in this direction [73]. Among other things, civic participation is important as a source of observations and ideas for individual intentions, while social control can also take place [70].

Civic participation is a major component of the land-use planning process, which is generally executed by experts via a political contracting authority. Civic participation has an irreplaceable role in supplementing expert knowledge and planning [9] with the "know-how" of local inhabitants [29]. The optimal degree of civic participation in landuse planning cannot be defined in a universally applicable manner, but it is possible to describe a number of its typical basic features. An optimal degree of civic participation (1) should constitute a representative sample of the population that inhabits the given territory—individuals are not enough, whilst a 50% or higher level of involvement is not completely necessary, but groups of dozens of people may be sufficient if (2) these groups are well balanced and represent various population segments (young X old; employees X entrepreneurs; healthy X ill, etc.). Additionally, these groups may sufficient if (3) they bring relevant proposals from the citizens, which can be and are accepted, but also other impulses that are not or cannot be satisfied, and if they also allow individual citizens or groups to express themselves and enter into debate, which promotes awareness of the issue and facilitates collaborative education [3–5], thus providing the municipality with a more educated and experienced citizenry and promoting a civil society [59] with a greater future potential for participation. However, participatory bias [48] must always be taken into account as a negative external attribute.

The recommendations that can ensure and facilitate an optimal degree of civic participation in land-use planning may be summarized in the following points.


website, or an article in a bulletin published by the local council, perhaps structured as an interview with the mayor or with the expert who is preparing the plan.

This research deals with the optimal level of civic participation, which should be an important element for land-use planning in terms of quality. This distinguishes the present study from most professional studies, which also deal with the topic of civic participation, as they usually address the quantitative aspect, i.e., how to strengthen public participation and gain more knowledge from the public for land-use planning. However, they almost never offer solutions for producing an effective participation process. Another important group of publications focuses on civic participation in terms of the positive and negative aspects of land-use planning. Further research could focus on the citizens' motivation to become involved in the land-use planning process and on identifying the factors that might boost participation, bearing in mind that [25] notes how important it is for participants to receive feedback on how their input was used, so this aspect should also be scrutinized in further detail. Moreover, considering that the scope of the research was limited to municipalities with a small population, it would suitable and beneficial to perform a comparison with larger-population municipalities and cities, or to investigate and identify the characteristic features of voluntary participants. Last but not least, this research was only based on the evaluation of municipal representatives, i.e., individual mayors, so it would be very beneficial to evaluate the optimal level of civic participation from the perspective of planners and the public, or their representatives, in other research.

**Funding:** The research was financially supported by the student research gran<sup>t</sup> competition of the University of Ostrava for the years 2019 [SGS16/PˇrF/2019] and 2020 [SGS11/PˇrF/2020].

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available on request from the author.

**Acknowledgments:** The author wishes to thank the mayors of the individual municipalities for finding time to participate in the project and for sharing their experience regarding the given issue. He is also grateful to his supervisor Petr Rumpel for his expert advice and to Tomáš Ulip and Aneta Krausová for providing technical and administrative support during the fieldwork.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
