Urban planning has been one of the most challenging competences transferred to the local government in Macedonia with the decentralization process in 2005.3 Since then, several revisions of the legal framework have been adopted in order to improve the urban planning process and to make it more transparent and participatory. Municipalities were authorized to manage the construction land on their territories from July 2011.4 However, the procedures for drafting and adopting the four different types of urban plans – general, detailed, for residential areas and for non-residential areas – are complex, multi-layered and mostly incomprehensible to the citizens whose lives they affect.