Participatory urban governance and the involvement of citizens in local decision-making are being revived in the face of global challenges, such as climate change. Participatory processes are often believed to foster social cohesion and channel valuable local knowledge. However, public involvement is not free from tensions between experts and inhabitants and between formal and informal practices that tend to compromise the desired effects. This presentation considers three decades of the formal attempts for public involvement in urban design and planning in Czech cities to understand how the relationship between the expert approaches and local mundane practices and knowledge has been shaped. My research is based on semi-structured interviews with expert practitioners (architects, planners, consultants, facilitators) and media analysis (1989-2022). It demonstrates how the position of the locals and their knowledge, as well as the notions of good, innovative, relevant participatory practices, developed over time: Firstly, the early 1990s expert discussion of modes of local administration or conceptual architectural issues have been overridden by NGO-driven emphasis on democratization and small-scale projects in public space. Later, the emphasis shifted from public sector capacity-building to project management and private know-how. Throughout the process, urban policy mobility, mainly from Western cities, influenced how cultures of public participation on the municipal level developed, shaping the policies of the possible in multiple ways. Through this temporal development, I discuss how the potential for inclusion of the local voices has been selectively constrained to open channels for future recognition of local voices and mundane practices that may be a source of already present ‘inconspicuous innovations’ (Ferenčuhová 2020, project proposal, https://cescame.soc.cas.cz) potentially helpful in addressing local expressions of global issues.

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