ABSTRACT
Constructing knowledge through dialogue and participation and changing a given situation through shared action constitute the fundamental elements of the democratic planning process. However, numerous factors change the conduct of the process, and power relations are one of them. They are inevitable but they can be a contributing factor to the process when their existence is recognised and accepted. This chapter presents how low levels of active citizenship and emerging mutual power relations, when associated with political commitment to a shared future and when supported by sustained leadership, can promote collaboration in participation. It also shows how corrupted politicised active citizenship and emerging adversarial power relations can lead to conflict in a well-structured participatory process within an enabling administrative mechanism for participation. To present this analysis, the chapter compares two planning processes conducted in two Turkish provinces, Adıyaman and Bursa by adopting action research as a research strategy. The former is located in one of the least developed regions with almost no history of participation, the latter, in the most developed with strong active citizenship. This difference is important for the study because it draws the contextual ground upon which the dialectics about the future of the sites were constructed and it allowed a systematic observation of the emerging politics with and without active citizenship.
