How civic claims become planning problems: civil society, institutions, and urban governance

This paper examines how civic claims acquire institutional relevance in urban planning beyond the dichotomy of conflict versus collaboration. It proposes an interpretive framework combining civic translation capacity, institutional learning capacity, and a public problems perspective to analyse how urban issues become legible within planning systems. The framework is applied to three civic initiatives in Bulgaria (Stara Zagora, Varna, and Sofia) through process tracing, document analysis, and media sources. The comparison shows that planning outcomes depend less on the confrontational or cooperative character of civic action than on the interaction between the capacity to translate spatial concerns into institutionally recognisable claims and the ability of institutions to learn from and act upon them. The paper offers a transferable analytical matrix for studying civil society–institution relations in urban governance.