Central European Planning Culture and its Competitive Advantages and Disadvantages in Enhancing Regional Competitiveness

Spatial planning is a set of managerial activities focused on a given territory's balanced and sustainable development and territorial subjects. It is obvious that planning in general, and especially the role of the planners, has been lately substantially modified – they shifted their societal positions from regulators and designers of our future toward the facilitators of versatile and multidimensional processes of spatial development. In this process, variables and phenomena like community, identity, place, social behaviour or human values play a significant role more than ever. Planning has overreached its normative essence and is by now a multidimensional participatory process reflecting the cultural background of the society. The unique character of any given planning culture is determined by the value system, which is mediated by and mirrored in the acting, communication, and leadership patterns. Understanding cultural dynamics and developing a clear vision of the desired planning culture based on democratic leadership and its active fostering should be essential competencies of any planner. Recent societal developments (fragmentation of the society, negative demographic change, endangered social cohesion) highlighted the need for special attention dedicated to these issues. It has been confirmed that highly profiled planning cultures based on active leadership generating a typical set of principles, values and approaches are arguably as important for any territory's balanced and sustainable development as a wide array of normative and formal instruments. A productive planning culture based on democratic decision-making and effective leadership is becoming a vital part of regional competitiveness – the ability of the city, region, or whole state to be successful in different competitions and interactions with other subjects or partners. Our contribution is to analyze the main scope of planning culture and its role in increasing regional or territorial competitiveness, and it concentrates on special traits of Central European planning culture in this regard.