Recently urban regeneration has become an important part of urban policies of many towns and cities worldwide. Availability of financial resources impacted the engine of change in the approach to the revitalization of many urban sites. At the same time not always it lead to the improvement of the quality of life. The participatory approach involves the wide range of stakeholders in the common process of planning. One of the ways of cooperation is a work with active neighborhood residents. Riga, the capital of Latvia, has 58 neighborhoods, and more than ten of them have their own neighborhood associations and activist groups in social sites that are actively and constructively defend their neighborhood citizens. The paper examines the main fields of public activity and identifies the main challenges in cooperation process between different stakeholders involved in urban regeneration.