Social media have been increasingly used by governments and planning professionals to gain public opinions, distribute information, and support participation in planning practices. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted to understand the influence of local contexts and the extent to which social media can enhance citizen power and inclusion. This study investigates the role of social media in citizen participation by taking case studies in the Netherlands. It adopts a mixed methods approach that combines interviews, web scraping, and content analysis to understand the characteristics of social media participation. There are several key findings. First, support policies and a high level of social media penetration rate are preconditions for more inclusive participation. Second, social media enhance social inclusion by engaging many participants, who may not be able to participate via traditional methods. Third, they facilitate interactions and different levels of citizen power, though the government still plays a leading role within top-down approaches. Finally, they improve the effectiveness of participation regarding transparency, accessibility, and workable solutions. However, there are several potential political and social bias associated with social media technology. The combination of online and offline participation methods is properly necessary to engage different groups in the planning process.

There has been considerable debate about Habermasian-inspired communicative planning theory and Mouffe’s-inspired agonistic planning theory. This study investigates the possibility of the communicative and agonistic approaches for collaborative planning in the Chinese context. It examines three common theoretical dimensions, regarding the political concept, the public sphere and the power relation. The recent political development in China is related to authoritarian deliberation, in which governments allow some space for deliberation and participation but with limited empowerment. The multiple tensions between governments and society lead to the fragmentation of public spheres and various forms of power relations in collaborative practices. This study concludes that a dichotomous perspective is not helpful to understand China’s collaborative planning, which reflects features of both communicative and agonistic approaches.

Numerous studies have found that jobs, amenities, and location influence housing prices in urban areas. However, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of the impacts of these factors on various housing submarkets within a city. With the case study of Xiamen, this paper investigates the impacts of jobs, amenities, and location on four housing submarkets, classified by owner-occupied and rental housing, in inner and outer districts. The hedonic model, Chow test, and Tiao-Goldberger test are applied to analyze differentiation in the determinants of housing prices between four submarkets. The results show that all submarkets are influenced by blue-collar jobs (which have negative effects) and seascape (which has a positive impact). Besides, differentiated after submarkets show that school districts and public transportation have a greater influence on owner-occupied markets than on rental markets. A heterogeneity exists between inner-district and outer-district markets. For instance, bus rapid transit (BRT) has a positive effect on housing and rental prices in the outer districts but not in the inner districts. These differences are mainly caused by the disparities of spatial quality, economic development, and public facilities and amenities. The findings have profound implications for decision-making and planning practices.