Recent Progress in Online Communication Tools for Urban Planning: A Comparative Study of Polish and German Municipalities

Planning Contexts In Poland And Germany

The main purpose of this paper is to compare the development of e-participation in Western European countries with long democratic traditions and in the regions of Eastern Europe where democracy was reestablished in the last 25 years. On a continent shattered by two world wars, persisting political and ideological differences are a central issue in the discussion about governance and participation. In the period of the Iron Curtain, the contrast between Eastern and Western Europe, the poor versus the wealthy, the plan versus the market, and authoritarian versus democratic rule was very evident (see Bunnin & Duessel, 2006). Then, the system transformation in the post-socialist block brought the reintroduction of democracy, and since then the range of citizen participation on various levels of public administration, including local spatial planning, is being constantly extended.