Planning and the Public in Vilnius

The Commission on Urban Planning held a seminar in Vilnius on 19-21 April. The theme was "Planning and the Public", which covered public participation and involvement in city planning processes, planning of public spaces and how the public spaces are experienced by their users.

Vilnius, a beautiful city with half a million inhabitants with an exceptionally beautiful historical old town and a dynamically growing new business centre, tempted almost 40 city planning professionals to hear interesting presentations on public participation both in Vilnius and in the US and about experiencing public spaces. Vilnius has a new master plan for 2006-2015 with 500 hectares of potential development areas, 120 hectares of which are in the central parts of the city.

As usual, an important part of the seminar was exchanging knowledge and discussing hot topics in city development. As an example of development of planning instruments, the participants heard about Umea's research on using Google Earth as a tool of planning and presenting plans to the public, a method that will certainly be a part of everyday planning in the future.

Two of the seminar workshops were about Zverynas, a beautiful and popular old dwelling area close to the city centre with a history from the 16^th century and 12,200 inhabitants. The workshops analyzed the problems, values and opportunities of Zverynas and made proposals for future development, like improving traffic conditions, turning the old wooden hospital into a spa and building new parks, playgrounds and sports fields for the needs of the area's inhabitants.

The other two workshops were about the north bank of the River Neris, where a recreational area with new functions should be built to highlight a new business centre with the tallest skyscrapers in the Baltic countries. The workshops proposed to build a tunnel to connect the city districts divided by the river and to construct an all-year-round oasis of leisure, art and culture with flowers, bushes and green areas. Also, the groups suggested improvement of planning and material quality of the old concrete structured river banks with new lighting fixtures and benches for pedestrians.

The seminar participants also talked about involvement and participation of the public in the new development projects and proposed e.g. discussion forums on the city website, as well as other methods of participation. It is important to keep in mind that the development is made to create opportunities for better quality of everyday life for the inhabitants of the city, and therefore a democratic planning process with clear responsibilities is vital.