Position of the Polish city on the ladder of public participation: Are we going the right way? The case of Poznań

•The key point of the reflections is public participation in planning in a city.•On the one hand are analyzed operational possibilities offered by the authorities.•On the other hand article shows NGOs actions and residents’ point of view.•The article illustrate what standards of collaborative planning are in Poland today.

That participation in planning was a kind of a continuum was already noted by Arnstein in the 1960s. She distinguished eight steps within this continuum in the authority–community relation (i.e. on the participation ladder): manipulation, therapy, informing, consultation, placation, partnership, delegated power, and citizen control (Arnstein, 1969, after Cornwall, 2011). The questions posed in this article are the following: At what point on the participation ladder can we find one of the biggest Polish cities? How do their authorities implement the public participation paradigm in city management, and what social response do their measures meet with?To answer the basic question of this study, four issues will be compared:–the structure of the Poznań City Hall in terms of organizing and conducting social communication,–measures taken by the city authorities,–residents’ opinions about public participation and their current communication with the authorities, and–a look on the role of the local NGOs.In this way an analysis will be made of two significant aspects of the creation of a participatory planning paradigm: operational possibilities offered by the city authorities and planning units to residents wishing to co-author the design of urban policy in the field of planning, and residents’ awareness of the possibility of their co-authorship.