A Sustainable City Made By Resident-Experts - How Designerly Intervention Enacted Rights of the Public and Urban Infrastructure

Bibliographic Data

ID5337416
AuthorsD Koo (0000-0003-2858-7766, Sociology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume50
Issue5
Pages1016-1045
Publication date2025-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01622439241283060
OpenAlexW4402567954
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited36

This paper proposes an investigation of how enacting infrastructure is intertwined with historically specific processes of constructing the public, which necessitates a focus on the co-production of public problems and the public, and the establishment of infrastructural connections . Intervening in the context where reflexive planning and design methodologies are deployed to implement urban regeneration through public engagement (what I call "designerly intervention"), this paper investigates what type of collectivity is constituted as infrastructural publics by designerly interventions and what forms of rights they can have. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of urban regeneration in Seoul, it shows how designerly interventions mobilize residents as possessing a novel form of expertise, as "resident-experts" who can design a sustainable city, problematizing the renewal of the worn-out infrastructure as how to stimulate the resilience of a city. This results in an infrastructural connection that focuses on immediate results and the ordinary scale of urban regeneration, which enacts the rights of the public as city-users' rights, namely not as rights protected by law but as a practical capacity that infrastructural devices in everyday life provide. This paper explores how designerly interventions invoke an experimental approach that opens up the normative questions of public engagement with planning

Economic growth · Economics · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Public Administration · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access