Abstract
The spirit and practice of community development have been existing in China's traditional society for a long time. The traditional top-down management has gradually emerged disadvantages in the governance of old city communities. Some plan implementations are facing ownership issues, financial problems, etc. A range of users’ demands cannot be taken into account within the upper decision. In this context, community empowerment has become a hot topic under the background of the new period planning, which is a methodology that starts from community life, gathers all kinds of social forces and resources, and completes the process of self-organisation, self-governance, and self-development through the mobilization and actions of people in the community. However, the growing economy and the changing industrial structure have pushed a large floating population into urban centres recently, which leads to chaos and alienation are filled in the old residential districts and urban villages, and social trust is gradually faded in the neighbourhood as well. Some notions that social trust, reciprocal norms, and relationship networks are important factors to realize community empowerment. This study will explore the effective way to stimulate residents' awareness of participation and enhance their ability to participate in governance through reinventing social relationship networks within the neighbourhood. With community empowerment as the primary scope of this study, this research will focus on the different interaction forms between residents and their community public spaces under different planning disciplines globally. The comparison will be made via analysing different existing community living models across the world including the residential model of Danwei in the period of planned economy of China, and the co-living model in the Danish and the USA, etc. In addition, to demonstrate how would the effective planning and empowerment mechanism affect the community spaces, and what barriers would occur during the implementation process, the research will then move onto the studies of practical projects in Shanghai and Guangzhou as well as author’s practical planning experiences in two counties, Cixi in Zhejiang Province and Hekou in Yunnan Province, as representatives of both aspects of geographic locations and economic volumes, which will be comprehensively covering the variety of community empowerment in the context of today’s China. In conclusion, it is the fact that communication and publicity play important roles in community empowerment in China based on the unique land system and the weak sense of public participation of residents. Compared with emphasizing public participation directly in community planning at the beginning, it is vital to make community residents understand what their rights and obligations are through introducing community planner system. Only when residents understand that community planning is related to their vital interests can they really pay attention to community planning and take the initiative to participate in it and put forward their opinions，which is the ideal result of the community empowerment. Key words: public participation, social trust, relationship networks, community planner
