The participation of society in public spaces issues, though advocated for decades, experiences an increase in recent years. Citizen participation in Croatian spatial planning appears to be mostly declarative and formally takes place in the final stages of planning. On the contrary, the full benefits of integrative planning would be if participation of all sectors (civil, academic, economy and management structures) is continuous, especially important in the initial planning phase - forming the basic intentions. The selection of the best spatial solution by architectural and urban planning competitions has a long and fruitful tradition in European societies. It represents a good yet hermetic method in searching for the most appropriate, most innovative and overall best solution whose authors remain anonymous till the very end of the selection. The question is how to combine these two widely accepted and proven procedures into one, to acquire the best creative solution and raise awareness and involvement of the community? The article will present recent case studies of participation in open competitions in Poland, Germany, Norway, and Croatia. The contribution of this paper is the effort to present systematically the ways of participation and how they are linked to individual groups of stakeholders within the competition procedure. Through the comparative analysis, highlighting benefits and challenges, the combined procedure model is proposed and applied in the Croatian context.