Reshaping Public Participation Institutions through Academic Workshops: The ‘Gardens of Art’ International Urban Workshop in Wroclaw, Poland

This paper recounts our experiences of community participation, student education and stakeholder learning in Poland, based on the ‘Gardens of Art’ (GoA) workshop that the authors and several other colleagues run in the summer of 2009. Twenty years after the fall of the communist regime the country's planning system finds itself gridlocked by impasses between planners and civic society resulting, as we argue, from the lack of effective formal and informal consultation mechanisms. The ‘Gardens of Art’ workshop offered an opportunity to demonstrate in practice how such impasses could be overcome in an incremental way which takes into account the local sensitivities about and expectations from public participation as well as the local understanding of the role of planning and planners.