Participatory Design and Forms of Living Together

Could it be that we have spent so many decades living immersed in a world–system based on modern, capitalist, neoliberal, and patriarchal approaches that we find it strange, alien, and utopian to conceive other forms of coexistence that are not based on competition and individualization? Can we reintegrate ourselves and move towards the complex reality of social life from communal and collaborative community processes?

For a long time, we have witnessed the effects of what Echeverría (2016) has called "capitalist modernity," whose civilizing project has resulted in the construction of a universal subject, the homogenization of ways of life, cultural uprooting, and significant inequalities across the planet. This would not have been possible without feeding "the fantasy of individuality" (Hernando, 2012), the naturalization of competition, the illusions of meritocracy, and the professionalization of knowledge.

Likewise, the glorification of technocracy, in which "experts" and "specialists" claim the authority to formulate diagnoses and impose solutions, has been combined in this civilizing project with what Quijano describes as the "coloniality of knowledge" by denying both the unschooled local knowledge that has historically sustained life and its collective production that arises from experience and daily life, from the interaction between people and their environment.

Over the years, this world–system of "patriarchal order" (Segato, 2019), filled with domineering and hegemonic acts, has significantly deteriorated people's autonomy to collectively manage the production, transformation, and improvement of their habitat. Thus, the notion of "Social Production and Management of Habitat" (SPMH) has emerged since the 1960s as an alternative trend to promote the search for social transformation based on collective, organized, and participatory design actions.

Its ethical and political stance demands a reflective awareness of our thinking and acting to avoid reproducing actions that generate violence, racism, domination, and social inequality. But to do so, it becomes necessary to rethink the current habitat challenges and its interdimensional and cross-scale reality, using the structural and systemic vision of complex thinking. This brings us closer to understanding the interrelation of the different phenomena that make up the socioecological reality of human habitation from four dimensions: territorial–environmental, economic–productive, socio–cultural, and political–normative, thus forming an indivisible unit that integrates unique, dynamic, interdefined, and relational processes (Enet, Romero, Olivera, 2008).

The SPMH breaks with the ideology of patriarchal modernity, founded on competition, individualization, and domination. Its methodological–practical core is based on the participation of different actors who collaborate through self-organization, autonomy, and freedom, searching for a more equitable, democratic, and fairer society. The term "participation" implies the recognition of the "other" through the collaborative work of people who determine for themselves their objectives and the paths through which they want to reach them (Romero, Mesías, 2004). Likewise, it necessarily implies social power redistribution processes in which people, far from being passive spectators or consumers, become involved in an active, responsible, and organized way in decision-making on the production of their habitat through intercultural, inter-epistemic, inter-actor, and inter-sectorial processes.

"The SPMH, which is based on collective self-management processes because it involves training, responsible participation, organization, and the active solidarity of the inhabitants, contributes to strengthening community practices, the direct exercise of democracy, the self-esteem of the participants and a more vigorous social coexistence.” (Ortiz, 2012)

But how do we learn another form of coexistence that integrates this plurality of voices, knowledge, emotions, and lived experiences? In this sense, participation proposes a deliberative dialogue, a process of mutual learning that accepts conflict, admits argumentation, and public debate (Pyatok, Weber, 1976). This leads us to rethink our role in architecture to move from a technocratic, imposing, and disabling praxis to an integral—technical and social—support that demands emancipation from those modern-patriarchal positions to relearn new ways of feeling, thinking, and making the world, in line with the ethical political position of the SPMH. Likewise, participation recaptures the qualities of strategic thinking by promoting the community’s creative and learning capacity to imagine possible futures from various collective actions that are flexible and adaptive to the moment and context (Enet, 2010).

The path set out by the SPMH requires us to strip ourselves of the much-promoted figure of the architect as the center of knowledge and creativity, as well as the search for individualized recognition that only enhances their condition as an artist. The transition towards livable futures, towards pluriverses, where the act of designing recovers its ontological complexity linked to the freedom to inhabit and autonomy, requires us to participate actively and consciously in more relational ways of designing our habitat. It implies collaboratively developing a standard scenario of strategies, tools, and convivial ways of inhabiting that allow us to reflexively transform ourselves into the process of creating and producing our habitat.

Main image: Participatory diagnosis with Ixtepec women to define collaborative strategies for a process of social reconstruction of their habitat.  Photo © Comunal