This paper critiques top-down, investment-led approaches which seek to re-use and re-habilitate cities but do little to tackle the social problems found in these areas. Urban regeneration projects rarely involve local people, and if they do, these are only engaged when the project has already been formulated. This paper departs from the premise that the community has the experience, knowledge and understanding of the place, and hence can come up with ideas which will benefit both the developers and the residents. Institutional ethnography was used to study how two organisations in a socially deprived area in Malta adopted public participation to come up with two types of political actions – one promoting the politics of demand, the other the politics of act. The paper explores whether and to what extent these types of political actions bring about social change that ameliorates the standard of living of the communities involved.