Designing Together

“Designing together: tracing the people, places, and practices of participatory design in urban Southeast Asia”

My master’s thesis at the National University of Singapore studied the ways participatory design ideas are learnt and adapted between and across Southeast Asian cities. It is based on interviews I conducted with 17 practitioners working in 11 Southeast Asian cities.

Abstract In this thesis, I examine how participatory design (PD) practitioners working across urban Southeast Asia connect with, relate to, and learn from one another. Recognising that this cadre of actors operates in multiple ways and to multiple ends, I draw from scholarship about social movements, policy mobilities, and communities of practice to analyse the various and sometimes ambiguous ways they assemble two forms of urban PD. First, I follow “placemaking” from its North Atlantic “truth-spots”, through global networks, to how it is cited and adapted in Southeast Asian cities. Second, I explore how “community architects” mediate relations and various visions for the urban at three different scales. In tracing these geographies of design, I contribute analysis on how Southeast Asian cities are being made at the nexus of several modes of urban relationality, in an ambivalent space that is both full of syncretic potential and ever at risk of appropriation.

Date 2022

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