**1. Introduction**

Participation is currently regarded as a major element of the planning process, as it seeks answers to questions of public interest—with the public's assistance [1]—so its application helps strengthen and advance democracy [2,3], especially aggregative democracy [4]. Participation leads to collaborative learning [3–5], which facilitates discussions between involved parties [6]. Participation also has a psychological dimension, as it supports people's need to express themselves and be part of something [7]. From a planning approach perspective, participation is the core component of "bottom-up" planning [8].

Effective and sustainable planning can rarely be achieved by expert knowledge alone, and civic participation offers a means of complementing the expert view [9]. At the same time, individual intentions should always be pre-emptively assessed to see whether participation is relevant and beneficial to the given project [10]. Participation has a positive effect on planning overall, though individual particularities will always display certain negatives as well [11]. For this reason, this article seeks to present a comprehensive evaluation of participation with regard to both positive and negative aspects in the landuse planning process, and aims to answer the primary question, contained in the paper's title, regarding whether an optimal degree of civic participation exists and can be defined. If possible, this would effectively enable experts to acquire information from everyday users of the territory, who have the best practical knowledge of it, while also gaining feedback on intended developments.

The aim of the article is to assess whether there is an optimal level of civic participation in the land-use planning process, and if so, to define its form and typical attributes, based on knowledge about civic participation from representatives of individual municipalities. A secondary aim of the paper is to sugges<sup>t</sup> suitable ways of facilitating an optimal degree of participation in the land-use planning process. The research is based on the author's fieldwork, which is supplemented by theoretical findings based on a survey of the relevant literature.

### **2. Civic Participation and Land-Use Planning**

Land-use planning is a necessary instrument for the deliberate managemen<sup>t</sup> of land and the sustainability of territorial policy [12], and participation currently has a solid tradition and is regarded as one of the core pillars of territorial policy, so much so that the term "communicative planning" is used [13]. Participation of the public is essential for obtaining local knowledge [5], which can be harnessed to improve the planning process [11,14], as it helps predict and identify areas of potential conflict in future land use [15]. If the experts (planners) understand these problems and the overall mode of operation of the given territory, they can plan effectively [16–18]. The issue is influenced by the region's historical experience with participation, which may determine the form of participation in relation to politicians and experts versus citizens and civic movements. Therefore, participation may manifest as conflict in one place and neutral cooperation elsewhere [19].

Land-use planning is a political instrument designed to ensure the sustainable development of a territory, and it is important for the involved parties to communicate and negotiate together. For this reason, the present approach to land-use planning is sometimes termed "participatory land-use planning" (PLUP) [20]. Civic participation may take various forms within the land-use planning process; some examples with regard to direct contact between citizens and experts include hearings, dialogue meetings, and workshops [21], or other types of a visual nature [22]. Participatory tools can be hard or soft [23], where "hard" tools are derived from legislation [24], such as public hearings [25], and "soft" tools have a more informal and supplementary character, such as public surveys or participatory workshops [26].

### *2.1. Civic Participation: The Strengths and Positives in Land-Use Planning*

Participation brings decisions closer to those actors of territorial development [27] who are everyday users of the territory, thus helping to identify the consistency, compatibility, or potential conflict in the territory's use [28]. Civic participation is a means of applying the "know-how" of local inhabitants to the planning process [29], and it facilitates familiarity with the mode of operation and natural conditions of the given area [3], consequently enabling a higher effectiveness in decision-making [2]. Participation may also have a preventative character, as it can avoid potential future protests of citizens against the implementation of the planned intentions [30]. With more relevant parties, including inhabitants, involved in the planning process, better solutions can be found to individual problems [31], leading to greater public satisfaction with the chosen solution [2]. Civic participation also improves the overall effectiveness of planning and citizens' satisfaction with the process [32], making it more legitimate and informed [6].

If the findings obtained from the public are applied to a sufficient extent, the land-use plan and the individual decisions subsequently based off of it may benefit from a higher effectiveness and efficiency [18,33], as planning sourced solely from expert and academic perspectives is often lacking in terms of the effect [32]. Citizens may also provide basic information, and they are one of the cornerstones of a successful transformation into a smart city or village [34]; people with matching intentions and interests may also associate and form groups and coalitions [35], which may bolster local social cohesion. The ever-growing use of online technologies also offers a greater potential for public engagemen<sup>t</sup> [36].

### *2.2. Civic Participation: The Weak Points and Negatives in Land-Use Planning*

Participation in land-use planning is generally required by law [23], but this often takes on a mostly pro-forma character [37], and participatory mechanisms are very weakly institutionalized [38]. This explains why, in practice, steps that reinforce participation are rarely made voluntarily, and are instead mandated by legislation [39], which merely illustrates how little importance is accorded to participation by many politicians and experts [40]. Experts generally lack sufficient skills to effectively incorporate the inhabitants' input into their land-use planning, even when they consider it valuable [37,41], ye<sup>t</sup> on the other hand, they do not necessarily always respect or trust these lay opinions and observations, as most citizens do not wield expert knowledge and do not comprehensively understand the process in all its complexity [42]. Nonetheless, it is important for experts to have the ability to communicate [43], because the intentions and perspectives of experts and the public may differ drastically [44]. Another issue is the frequent absence of any methodological framework for participatory planning [45].

Local knowledge has a largely spatial character [3], which does not allow it to be applied elsewhere [46,47], while conversely, there can be no universally valid solution [18]. There is also the danger of participatory bias, in which certain groups promote their own interests [48], seeking individual benefits to the possible detriment of the territory's landuse planning, such as in the case of flood risk [49,50], as a consequence of their preference for rapid returns on investment [40]. All in all, land-use planning offers considerable potential for self-enrichment, which may also be channeled via participation—for example, when changing a property's use class (such as turning agricultural land into a building lot)—and this invites a real risk of corruption. Therefore, planning should incorporate anti-bribery measures [51].

With regard to participation, it is ill-advised to rely solely on voluntary engagemen<sup>t</sup> by citizens, as this does not provide comprehensive information about the territory [52]. Voluntary participation usually generates an uneven representation of individual categories of citizens—for example, young inhabitants evince minimal engagemen<sup>t</sup> [53]—whereas individual groups (variably classified by age or selection method) may identify different problems and define divergent preferences [52]. Therefore, if a group is not represented during the planning process, its opinions and needs are not reflected in the resulting plan. The non-participation of individual groups can lead to the plan's faulty interaction with the local environment [53], and so it is always important to involve all parties and groups based on various criteria [45], instead of only relying on voluntary, self-induced engagemen<sup>t</sup> [48]. In practice, the initiating entity often fails to achieve a desirable level of actual participation [39], as local governments and planners only rely on voluntary participation and do not actively seek information other ways [52].

### *2.3. Challenges for Civic Participation and Land-Use Planning*

Interaction between individual citizens, their communities, and policy-makers is important [3], ye<sup>t</sup> these groups often evince a lack of social cohesion, which limits the community's ability to participate [54]. Despite this, for planners, politicians, and citizens to be able to plan correctly and efficiently, they must have sufficient information about the given territory [12], and such critical information and knowledge can be obtained from the citizens, including inhabitants and owners of property [55]. With regard to participation, it is suitable to designate the relationship between planning and private ownership, which is seen as a potential threat if left unregulated, in the sense of the unproductive and uneconomic use of land [56], and this leads to the necessity of private participation [2].

For citizens to be engaged, they must be intrinsically motivated to become involved in the process [57], and the best way to secure their engagemen<sup>t</sup> is to induce in citizens the feeling that they own a given project (such as the municipality's territory via the land-use plan), which will lead to their greater creativity and effort [58]. However, for that to be possible, citizens must be informed about both the land-use planning process itself and their means of involvement [36]. It is important to convince the inhabitants that participation in the land-use planning process is a key instrument for ensuring the sustainable development of the territory [14,37], which may in turn secure good living conditions and satisfy the needs of the territory's inhabitants in the long term [16,40]. Primarily, it would be suitable to cultivate in citizens the sense that participation and policy co-creation is the mark of a "good citizen" [59]. At the same time, the added value of public participation must be considered [60], and there is a need to define the criteria for public participation for the purpose of evaluating the participatory tools used [8].

Local governments should be open to both traditional and new forms and instruments of public engagemen<sup>t</sup> [61]. A prominent current topic with regard to participation is the use of information and communication technologies [36], the potential of "Web 2.0" [52], and online instruments to boost citizens' involvement in land-use planning [62], such as public participation GIS (PPGIS), participatory GIS (PGIS), and volunteered geographic information (VGI) [52,63–65]. Online tools have added value in how they facilitate the dissemination of information, public involvement, and the accumulation of local knowledge [60], though one negative is social injustice, as not all groups of the population are able to use these instruments equally well [60]. For example, the use of social networks brings the issue closer to younger inhabitants, whereas paper questionnaires ensure a better spread of individual age groups in the surveys, but do not address the question of the respondents' different levels of education [66].

### **3. Research Methodology**

The spatial scope of the research was limited to municipalities in one of the Higher Territorial Administrative Units of the Czech Republic, namely, the Ústí Region. This territory is further divided into seven districts, which are of administrative and statistical significance. The research took place in only four of these districts, located in the central and eastern parts of the Ústí Region, namely, the districts of Teplice, Ústí nad Labem, Dˇeˇcín, and Litomˇeˇrice. The remaining three districts of Chomutov, Most, and Louny were not taken into account, as a relevant research sample was already assembled using the first four districts mentioned.

Specific municipalities were chosen using the stratified random sampling method [67], with the population size as the primary criterion, with an upper limit (maximum) of 2000 inhabitants and no lower limit (minimum). The selected municipalities were then approached to ascertain whether they have their own land-use plan (Czech municipalities are not obliged to have one); this ensured that the municipalities had experience with the analysed issue of land-use planning. All of the selected municipalities met this condition. As of 31 December 2018, the chosen territory contained a total of 180 municipalities with a population of up to 2000 [68]. Of these, 63 municipalities were approached with a request for an interview, which was then carried out in 24 of them (Figure 1); these constitute the case study. The request for an interview was refused in nine municipalities, mainly due to the busy schedules of local representatives, or for reasons of personal leave or a sense of having an insufficient competency to address the issue. The remaining municipalities (30) did not respond to the email request.

The fieldwork was conducted in the form of personal interviews with the mayors of the municipalities. The Czech Republic features a relatively large number of units of basic local governmen<sup>t</sup> (municipalities), and so, especially in low-population municipalities, the mayor is often the "only employee", whose position also gives him or her a complex view of the municipality's daily operations and development; mayors also very frequently retain their office for several terms. Interviews were chosen as a research technique for efficient data collection, using a semi-structured format [67,69], based on a set of pre-determined ye<sup>t</sup> open questions. One advantage of this type of interview is that its semi-structured nature limits the subjective influence of the questioner and improves the potential for further analysis [67], while providing opportunities to cover issues that only appeared in the course of the interview [69]. One disadvantage is that the interviews are standardized, which can detract from their authenticity and flexibility [67]. All the interviews were

performed by the same person to ensure that they were conducted in the same manner and maintained cohesion. The respondents were promised in advance that their words and the information they provided would be anonymized, and so, after the conclusion of the fieldwork, the individual interviews were code-numbered before being analysed. The mayors were contacted solely by email in early July 2019, and the interviews took place in the period from 24 July to 21 September 2019. In three cases, the deputy mayor replaced the mayor for the interview due to scheduling conflicts or unavailability of the latter. The duration of each interview ranged from 15 to 30 min and averaged 20 min. All the interviews were conducted and analysed in Czech, with excerpts then translated into English for the purpose of this article. A summary of the respondents is given in Table 1.

**Figure 1.** Map of the Ústí Region, showing districts and municipalities where the fieldwork took place.

The interview consisted of 11 questions in total, of which four were the primary focus of this analysis, being directly related to the research questions. The remaining seven queries were of secondary importance, being of an auxiliary and supplementary character. The four primary questions, which are analysed in the subsequent section of this article, were as follows:



**Table 1.** Overview of the respondents.
