After the fall: crisis and renewal in urban planning in the Czech Republic.

In the postcommunist Czech Republic, we see planners being transformed from technocrats closely identified by the public with government bureaucracies and party estate objectives into political actors in private and quasi-private practice, with direct relations to the public they will need both as patrons and political constituencies. Planners play complex roles in the new planning. Often the sole proponents of the public interest, they also mediate the conflicting interests that are generated by broad institutional change. Planning itself faces contradictory demands. On the one hand, legitimacy within a democratic system requires citizen participation. But citizen participation is at odds with state demands for managerial autonomy, demands which persist no matter what underlying social and economic interests are being served. Citizen participation is also potentially at odds with professional authority and planners are beginning to experience populist resistance. Although most attention is focused upon privatization or marketization, this article has emphasized political decentralization and democratization, other important aspects of the present transformation.