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Public participation and civic engagement in the urban planning process are societal trends that stretch across countries, cultures, and classes. After decades of communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc, where there was basically no civic participation, civic society in the Czech Republic began to engage in discussions with the authorities, and citizens became more active in local planning. In 1994 eleven municipalities started the Network of Healthy Cities of the Czech Republic as a platform for sharing good practices in sustainable development and local participation. In the last three years, members of the Network have used emotional mapping activities to facilitate and improve the process of participatory planning. This paper describes the timeline of development and the deployment of an emotional mapping methodology in various workshops in the Healthy Cities network. A total of forty-six emotional mapping workshops were organised in thirty-five municipalities of the Czech Republic. The paper presents the change from crayon-based maps to digital web-mapping platforms; and presents a case study of the Prague 12 district, where emotional mapping workshops were used to explore the perception of safety, among other issues.

The differences in welfare amongst European countries are especially evident in border regions, and this affects cross-border cooperation and relationships. Due to the historical development of Central and Eastern European countries over the last century, the affected countries are unique “laboratories” for geographical research. This study assesses disparities in socio-economic indicators representing socio-economic phenomena in the Czech-Polish border region, through the analysis of cross-border (spatial) continuity, using quantitative methods (multivariate statistics and socio-economic profiling), GIS analysis and cartographic visualisation. It is demonstrated how such a combination of methods is useful for the comparison and evaluation of the complex socio-economic situations in neighbouring countries. This research project identifies the most suitable common indicators for a proper evaluation of cross-border (spatial) continuity, and it reveals the spatial patterns as reflected by a cluster analysis. The greatest cross-border (spatial) continuity is apparent in the easternmost part of the borderlands, while significant differences on both sides of the border are evident in the very central part of the areas under study. The paper also describes methodological aspects of the research in order to provide a quantitative approach to borderland studies.

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