Governing through design: the politics of participation in neoliberal cities

ABSTRACT

This article critically analyses an empirical case of how design mediates governing power in situated contexts. Using the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, the article examines the specific role of co-design to enable governance through the strategic use of design techniques and artefacts. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken during the participatory urban redevelopment of Waterloo, Sydney, the article unpacks four concrete mechanism of governance through design: (1) the building of a seemingly coherent, stable and shared visions of Waterloo’s future; (2) the regulation of local knowledge production and political imagination; (3) the rendering of community technical through calculation techniques, standardisation, and the objectification of subjects; (4) the performance of diversity of choice while smoothing out differences. In conclusion, the article argues that, in Waterloo, the shift from top-down modes of urban governance to decentralised multi-stakeholders did not imply the reduction of state power but only supposed the rearrangement of governing power in the face of neoliberal urbanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• institutioning
• urban design
• neoliberal urbanism

1. Introduction

In recent years, participatory and localist discourses have proliferated in the agendas of urban governance and design. While this phenomenon generates new opportunities for co-design to intervene in large-scale projects and in the public realm, it also gives place to new dilemmas and concerns. One pressing concern is the fact that co-designer working in city-making projects still deals problematically with the ideological hegemonies of neoliberal urbanism. Contrary to co-design pillar values, this mode of urbanism puts at the core of its decision-making the priorities of surplus production and the attraction of capital (Brenner and Theodore 2005; Harvey 1989; Hackworth 2013). Moreover, authors such as Disalvo (2012), Palmås and Von Busch (2015) and Miessen (2010), highlight the post-political context in which participation usually occurs, exposing how its consensual-driven format may violently work against citizens’ interests, generate false perspectives of political agency, perpetuate social injustice and the legitimisation of controversial projects. Finally, participation in the city-level also continues to fit uncomfortably into the prevailing techno-managerial values of urban planning and its troubling depoliticising effect (Swyngedouw 2007; Swyngedouw and Moulaert 2010). All in all, these authors warn about participatory practices being increasingly instrumentalized to serve anti-democratic interest in urban governance (see, e.g., the Special Issue of this journal ‘Co-design and the Public Realm’, organised by Huybrechts, Benesch, and Geib 2017).

This article builds on this growing concern to examine how co-design mediates governing power, defined as the ways in which the state attempts to rule. The article analyses the participatory urban renewal of Waterloo, in Sydney, to argue that the shift from top-down modes of urban governance to multi-stakeholders does not necessarily imply the decentralisation nor the reduction of state power that co-design pursues. Indeed, web-like governing and the proliferation of participatory initiatives in local governments occur hand in hand with larger processes of neoliberalisation of cities and its associated austerity agenda (Sara, Jones, and Rice 2021). First, the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ of local government entails a shift in the municipalities’ fundamental function from a redistributive role in space production to an effort to induce and facilitate private investments in an increasingly competitive scenario (Harvey 1989). In addition, neoliberal governing is characterised by the change from a centralised power model to a dispersed multi-stakeholder governance or a mode of ‘governance-beyond-the-state’ (Swyngedouw 2005). For Nikolas Rose, in this neoliberal mode of governance, the state does not weaken its ‘will to govern’ (Rose 1999). Instead, it enables governance through – rather than over – an extended and decentralised web of non-political actors (including designers) that exceeds the formal state apparatus. In this process, citizen participation can play a key while regulating and disciplining citizens’ behaviours and subjectivity.

This article examines the concrete role of PD and co-design in this neoliberal mode of urban governance. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality – defined as ‘the conduct of conducts’ – I show how co-design can operate in terms of governance power during consensus-driven projects (Keshavarz and Maze 2013; Mazé 2021). While the association of participatory urban planning with governmentality is not entirely new (see, e.g., Blakeley 2010), this analysis focuses on the specific role of co-design in governing practices, looking at how governance is enabled through the strategic use of design techniques and artefacts.

To illustrate this claim, the article examines the participatory urban redevelopment of Waterloo, one of the few remaining public housing estates in inner-Sydney. In this case, in spite of a 12-month programme of community participation organised to shape the future of the neighbourhood, residents repeatedly claimed a lack of listening and genuine participation. The most critical tenants argued that the participatory process was a ‘box to tick’, meaning it had no real interest in dealing with the diverse claims among the community. Instead, interviewed participants claimed the process formed part of a wider technocratic and managerial ideology that worked to legitimise a controversial urban redevelopment. Building on these residents’ claims, this article argues that, in Waterloo, co-design articulated a decentralised mode of neoliberal governance that enabled the pacification of the redevelopment and allowed its continuity, despite significant opposition.

2. Framework: design as governmental technology

Michel Foucault coined the term governmentality to refer to the diverse technologies, procedures, and rationalities through which governance is enabled. Starting from the question of the possibilities of governing without the sovereign and the divine right to rule, Foucault (1991) proposed this neologism to explain the arts of governing free subjects. This ‘mentality of governing’ – or its rationalities – refers to the practices, institutions, regimes of truth, and calculations that create the possibility of governing, finally shaping and guiding people’s conduct (Gordon 1991). Following this perspective, governance and power are enacted through a diverse network of institutions, materials, and methods that produce governing as a rational practice (Baptista 2018). Importantly, the concept of governmentality brings to attention the disciplinary power and coercion associated with the arts of governing, both in the practice of governing others and in governing oneself.

Building on this argument, Cruikshank (1999) analyses how participation integrates such governmental rationality through what she defines as citizenship technologies: ‘the discourses, programs, and other tactics aimed at making individuals politically active and capable of self-government’ (Cruikshank 1999, 1). For the author, despite any honourable intentions, governments’ ‘will to empower’ tend to obscure what is less a solution than a strategy to govern those whose participatory initiatives typically seek to redress. Local participation, in this sense, is embedded in a very specific mode of governing power that draws on localist and participatory discourses and practices not only to legitimise controversial projects but to also regulate local knowledge production and enable governance through the linking of dispersed experts across different sites.

Co-design is not immune in this context. In fact, design processes and artefacts play an essential role to enact and perpetuate governance power. For this reason, design scholars such as Tunstall (2007), Mazé (2021) and Hepworth (2017) have recently called for further critical analysis on the intersection between governmentality and design. For Tunstall, governments are made tangible through design artefacts, communications, experiences, and environments. Examples of such power vary from systems of Census collection, to a guillotine, a government’s propaganda poster, or a passport, that in the words of Keshavarz (2019), are a designed thing that manages border and immigration. In all these examples, governing is enacted through designed systems and artefacts that ultimately mediate the trust, or distrust, that people hold in the regimes of government. Along these lines, Hepworth’s work (Hepworth 2017) pays special attention to the governing power of communication design, arguing that design artefacts, as embodied technologies, are the means by which discourses are produced, held, and retained temporarily. In her work, she analyses how the new visual identity of the state of Victoria (Australia) supported the reframing of the government’s role during its neoliberal transition. Accordingly, Mazé (2021) draws on the example of the World Design Capital to expose the capacity of design to shape, as well as to manipulate and mediate, the interrelations between citizens and the state as a national policy. In a nutshell, all these authors bring to attention the fact that governing mechanisms are, after all, designed.

This article advances this conversation by disentangling concrete design mechanisms that enabled governance in the public housing estate of Waterloo. If assuming that co-design activities integrate larger citizenship technologies, it is possible to understand how, in Waterloo, an extended web of social actors, including designers, drew on democratic discourses to motivate and conduct people’s behaviours towards governments own interests: the redevelopment of Waterloo, the selling of public land, and its associated surplus production. In other words, the article analyses how design processes and tools may function as a specific technology that produces governance as a rationale while shaping people’s conduct. In short, I argue that design enabled governance in Waterloo in four principal ways: (1) building seemingly shared visions of future, (2) regulating local knowledge production, (3) rendering the community technical, and (4) performing diversity of choice.

Methodologically, the results of this research are grounded on discursive materials of the New South Wales government, in association with a 14-month ethnographic fieldwork, in which I was not involved as a designer, but as an anthropologist.¹ Two main reports were analysed to understand how official documents performed seemingly participatory processes and enabled governance: the final reports of the envisioning and the testing phase of the participatory process. I rely on official documents because they constitute a key design and bureaucratic artefact to convey the government’s narratives and rationalities. In addition, I also weave together with these documents analysis residents’ perspectives gathered through participant observation and 13 in-depth and semi-structured interviews with public housing tenants and participants of the participatory process. The analysis of data was largely inspired by Braun and Clarke’s (2006) proposal for reflexive thematic analysis, as wel Critical Discourse Studies. First, I carefully read the two official documents, coded, and organised them into themes. Then, I undertook a similar approach to the interviews and fieldwork notes to contrast and triangulate the analysis, finally finding the common areas I share in this paper. By following this mixed approach, it was possible to contrast official narratives with resident perceptions while bringing into the analysis the key effect of design to shape political subjectivities and the experience of participating within democratic institutions.

3. The redevelopment of Waterloo

In December 2015, the New South Wales state government of Australia announced a massive urban renewal project for Waterloo Estate, one of the largest public housing estates in Australia, situated in inner-city Sydney. The redevelopment proposal followed a growing trend in urban renewal: the social-mix model, defined by the mixed tenure of public and private housing. To do so, the entire estate will be demolished and rebuilt following a new 70-to-30 ratio of private, state-owned, and non-government organisation-managed ‘social’ housing. During the construction period (from 15 to 20 years), public housing tenants will be relocated, maintaining their right to return, although probably only years or even decades later. In addition, public land in the estate will be sold-off and the funds raised are expected to fully finance the redevelopment, which will also triple its current 2,000 households. Given this backdrop, different authors such as Wynne et al. (2018) and Rogers and Darcy (2020) argue that the redevelopment of Waterloo participates in a larger project of neoliberal urbanism, including the privatisation of public land and a state-led form of gentrification.

An essential component of this redevelopment proposal was a 12-month participatory process. In 2017, the Land and Housing Corporation of New South Wales contracted external private consultants to run a participatory and engagement programme to gain input and feedback from Waterloo residents. The process comprised three main stages: the ‘envisioning phase’, ‘the testing options phase’, and the final preferred masterplan. The envisioning phase’s goal was to understand and identify the main needs of Waterloo. To do so, consultants organised a set of workshops, pop-up information stalls, focus groups, a ‘community day’, and an online survey. After the results of this preliminary phase, the government worked to reflect concrete citizens’ demands into three possible masterplans, beginning with that the new ‘testing options phase’. In this stage, residents expressed their ideas about the three options to ensure their needs and aspiration were reflected in the final masterplan (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Waterloo preferred masterplan (Source: NSW Government).

However, as I share in this article, given the controversial basis of the project – privatisation, gentrification, and dispossession – the participatory process was very limited, finally promoting its invert purpose. As it turned out, the participatory process facilitated the legitimisation of a controversial proposal, despite residents’ opposition and claims. For example, the density of the neighbourhood was higher than what tenants expressed, public land was privatised, the overall number of new public housing in the area was only slightly increased, and the buildings would finally be demolished, instead of refurbished as proposed by many residents.

4. Governing through design: concrete mechanism

The careful and critical analysis of the two final reports of the participatory process – here understood as bureaucratic design artefacts – demonstrates how design tools and devices supported the legitimisation of this controversial project while simultaneously mediating governing power. After following an extensive analysis of those documents in contrast to interview and fieldwork notes, I identified four main mechanisms of governance articulated through design that I will develop next: the support in the building of a seemingly coherent, stable and shared visions of Waterloo’s future; the regulation of local knowledge production; the rendering of the community technical through calculation techniques, standardisation, and the objectification of subjects; and the performance of diversity of choice while smoothing out differences.

4.1. Building (un)shared visions

The Let’s Talk Waterloo – Waterloo Redevelopment Visioning Report illustrates how design techniques operated as a mechanism to govern while supporting the building of a consensual narrative about the participatory process of Waterloo. As a persuasive tool for storytelling, design techniques – and especially visual communication knowledge – supported the production of a ‘vision’ of Waterloo, in which differences and opposition were obscured to detriment of a supposedly shared and consensual vision about the future of the neighbourhood. Skilful rhetoric, accompanied by appealing pictures, illustrations, and statistics, built the narrative of a homogeneous ‘vision’ while strategically avoiding issues of conflict.

Building a vision of Waterloo was generally grounded on the official narrative of how the participatory process occurred, which could be summarised as follows: for 12 months, experts organised a variety of participatory activities, tailored for different audiences, to share and discuss the future of Waterloo. Specialists analysed the information, identified common themes, and were able to synthesise the results into a common vision about the needs and desires of residents. In essence, the narrative reinforces that through well-thought participatory expertise, consensus was possible to be achieved in the community.

This rather suspicious narrative was weaved throughout the Visioning Report through a collaborative and conciliatory grammar and visual rhetoric. A conciliatory grammar is constituted by statements such as the report was developed with ‘the community’ and aligned with those of the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (KJA 2018, 21); the ‘community’ groups refined the aims of the process (KJA 2018, 18); and that ‘the community’ feedback would be combined with technical studies and inputs from the government (KJA 2018, 16). Such conciliatory sentences – including the strategic use of the term ‘community’ – produced in the reader the perception of a harmonious consensus of an already coherent group. It follows that totalising expressions such as ‘the people’s view’, ‘community feedback’, and ‘shared vision’ were used repeatedly, functioning as ‘floating signifiers’. This term refers to a semiotic operation where a signifier does not have a specific referent. Here, the meanings of ‘community’ were ambiguous and susceptible to power, implying a consensus among residents that in fact did not exist

At the same time, this consensual grammar was also supported by visual rhetoric, echoing Baxstrom’s (2013) argument that ‘even governmentality begins as an image’. For example, the report contains different images of smiling residents from a variety of nationalities, thus suggesting a diverse, joyful, and entertaining process of togetherness. Moreover, the materiality of the report itself – including the use of government logos, copyright symbols, and other visual resources used in government reports – conceived the seriousness and the authority necessary for a consensual narrative to be accepted as valid, despite any gaps between discourses and practices.

However, while this was the official narrative promoted by the government, it contrasted with some participants’ perspectives who claimed the process was indifferent to public housing tenants’ genuine demands, especially the ones related to political and economic decisions, such as direct public investment in the housing system. For example, Paul², the relative of a Waterloo tenant who was actively engaged in the consultation process, argued that the participatory results were doubtful as they combined results from private renters who lived in the neighbourhood of Waterloo, and public housing tenants of the estate. For him, this was an issue because those profiles expressed different desires and needs: one would have the right to remain in their house, and the other one would have to move from the neighbourhood for an indeterminate period. Indeed, on several occasions, Waterloo tenants expressed to me that they thought the interests of private residents were different from theirs. Many of them perceived the private residents as a threat to the affordability of their homes and to the way of life they were used to. They believed that private residents were active agents of gentrification and thus aligned with the proposed redevelopment. For this reason, Paul argued that the participatory process actively ‘washed out the wishes of people who lived in Waterloo’.

Design tools were central to process. It supported the creation of a single, coherent, and shared ‘vision’ of Waterloo while omitting its conflictive differences and diversity of opinion. Through rhetorical and visual techniques, the participatory process and the redevelopment itself were assumed to be a democratic, consensual, fair, and harmonious initiative, despite its controversial privatising interest and resulting displacement. Here, design played a key role in reinforcing the official narrative about participation and government’s propaganda, directly influencing the general public opinion about the process.

4.2. Rendering community technical

Reports of the participatory process illustrate a second mechanism of governing facilitated by design: the rendering of community technical, in which the building of a community – or the vision of a community – makes ‘collective existence intelligible and calculable’ (Tania Murray 2006, 4). For Tania Li, governance is mainly enabled by rendering community technical, meaning the transformation of the complexity of social relations into numbers and other standardisation techniques that make communities manageable and governable.

This practice is also referred by Rose as a mechanism to govern through community (Rose 1999). For him, in neoliberal modes of governance, the state enables governance by promoting individualised self-regulation, and linking dispersed experts across different sites through calculation techniques, standardisation, and the objectification of subjects. Rather than issuing direct commands, authorities shape and regulate economic and social arrangements to respond to their own ends. New metrics and standards, then, conduct people to those expected and appropriate behaviours for governing.

In Waterloo, design contributed to this task by visually rendering community technical. This mechanism is illustrated in the Waterloo’s visioning report, giving the significant space dedicated to explaining and justifying the methodology of the participatory process. The report claimed to merge quantitative and qualitative methods, exemplified throughout the document by the highlighting of selected quotations from residents. Coloured, bold, and highlighted numbers filled out the pages, indicating that 1500 persons had participated in the programme. A set of lists also indicated the activities undertaken, alongside graphs that demonstrated the profiles – mainly the ages – of participants (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Examples of ‘rendering community technical’ (Source: KJA Envisioning Report 2018).

Through this strategy, the report suggested a scientific approach to the process, supposedly able to reduce, control, and objectively understand the complex social reality of Waterloo through ‘data collection’ and the distillation of ‘insights’ and ‘key findings’ by experts. It follows that through the visual rhetoric of highlighted numbers, lists, and appealing images that represent ‘the community’ of Waterloo, design techniques supported the rendering of Waterloo as technical, controlled, and governable. In the words of Latour (1993), design techniques supported the ‘purification’ of social complexity as they supported the scientific performance of the participatory process.

Design in this sense makes what we understand by ‘community’, something tangible, stable, and actionable, in contrast to its constitutive conflicts and dynamic social relations. While this operation is not necessarily a problem in itself, it becomes an issue when it serves governing interests to transform the social complexity of communities into manageable units of governance. The community of Waterloo was investigated, documented, classified, translated, and finally represented to itself and to the wider public in the form of maps, statistics, diagrams, and reports – all realised with the support of design tools.

4.3. Regulating knowledge

Kothari argues that participatory techniques are always about ‘the identification, collection, interpretation, analysis and (re)presentation of particular forms of (local) knowledge’ (Kothari 2001, 143). Participatory techniques are thus inseparable from the exercise of power and governance, especially when working with state institutions. It follows that design plays a fundamental role in mediating and producing local knowledge, insofar it deploys persuasive tools and processes that frame the design (and social) problem that guide the participatory process and potentially limit political imagination.

This process of knowledge regulation can be understood through the analysis of the tools deployed in the participatory process of Waterloo. Three main tools were used during the ‘envisioning phase’ to identify the needs and aspirations of Waterloo residents: ‘dotmocracy’, ‘word clouds’, and blank canvases for residents to express what to keep, add, and change in the neighbourhood. ‘Dotmocracy’ provided participants with a colourful and large-scale canvas with questions or provocations. In this activity, residents were invited to stick three dots on this canvas as a voting and preference system (Figure 3). In the example provided in Figure 4, the prompt for the activity says ‘I would like to see Waterloo’s culture and history acknowledged and celebrated in this way’. Below the prompt, participants could choose different options: ‘public art’, ‘naming of communal/public spaces or building’, ‘cultural/community facilities or venues’, ‘signs to show important places’, ‘community events, programs and festivals’, or ‘building and landscape design’ (KJA 2018, 28).

Figure 3. ‘Dotmocracy’: participatory tools. (Source: KJA Envisioning Report 2018).

Figure 4. ‘Word Cloud’ and ‘Keep/change’: participatory tools. (Source: KJA Envisioning Report 2018).

The ‘word cloud’ was another tool employed during the process (Figure 4, right). In the centre of the cloud shape, participants could read the question, ‘What makes community special for you?’ With a marker, they could freely write what they thought inside the cloud. Finally, the final consultation tool invited participants to write on a ‘canvas’ things to ‘keep’, ‘change’, and ‘add’ to their neighbourhood (Figure 4, left).

These tools exemplify how ostensibly co-design tools and processes can regulate knowledge production and obscure the political content of top-down impositions. In this case, these tools guided the conversation by pre-setting the themes to be discussed and by framing the problems and the options available to choose. Specifically, the options available, and the questions raised during the process, were problematic for a variety of reasons. First, they were framed in terms of individual preferences. For example, the Word Cloud asked ‘what makes a community special for you?’ and invited for individual answers. This way, the shared and common vision presented was not the result of extensive deliberation among community participants nor agonistic pluralism (Mouffe 2005). It was a summation of individual priorities and preferences. The tools then limited themselves to visually juxtapose different ideas without necessarily determining how they were articulated or prioritised.

A second problem with the framing of questions was that, in some cases, it would have been plausible to implement all of the given options, as they were extremely vague and standard. No real conflicting options were given. For instance, it was plausible to aspire, at the same time, all the available options to celebrate historical heritage: ‘public art’, ‘naming of communal/public spaces or building’, ‘cultural/community facilities or venues’, ‘signs to show important places’, ‘community events, programs and festivals’, and ‘building and landscape design’. The options were all complementary options, and not exclusionary of one another. And yet, following an arbitrary criterion, residents were only able to choose three.

Aspirations, and sometimes even basic rights, were then framed as hierarchised individual preferences. Results included that ‘accessibility is very important to the people of Waterloo’ (KJA 2018, 37); that ‘feedback highlighted the importance of public transport’ (KJA 2018, 49); or that ‘feedback revealed the importance of facilities, services and shops that cater to the existing community’ (KJA 2018, 64). The results were anodyne. Participatory activities treated citizens’ rights such as accessibility or mobility in the city as a matter of individual choice, as if the best residents could ask for was simply that the redevelopment met minimum, vague standards of service for residents. At the same time, issues likely to generate conflict, such as the financing model of the redevelopment, were left out of the discussion.

These examples show how design processes played an essential role in local knowledge production while framing the problem and consequently the needs, aspirations, and political imagination in general. By guiding and narrowing down the questions and answers of the process, curtailing what and how they could be discussed, these activities made it look easy to achieve consensus, precisely because of their restrictions. As a result, it is thus possible to argue that the participatory design processes enacted a fundamental contradiction: residents participated, but only under very limited conditions. They did ‘have their say’ but were structurally restricted to what could be said, and their views were thematised in such a way as to water them down. In the end, knowledge was regulated and governance, in Foucault’s term, was enabled.

4.4. Performing free and diverse choice

In August 2018, the Land and Housing Corporation delivered a brochure with three preliminary options for the masterplan. The options marked the beginning of a new round of community participation, expressing a new mechanism to promote governing through design. The highly visual communication of the three options brochure created the appearance of choice although, in practice, residents had very few real differences to choose between. The brochure appeared to present multiple options while at the same time keeping those options so similar as to be almost undifferentiated. As Figure 5 illustrates, the three options provided were basic preliminary plans, with few details, and only subtle differences that could have triggered fruitful debates.

Figure 5. The three options of masterplan (Source: NSW Government).

This appreciation was also supported by participants in the process. Mary, for example, a public housing tenant, said the participation debates were centred on whether ‘we will shove the park down further, or we will close that road, or open that one’. And for her, ‘that [was] not much of a choice’. In other words, she expressed that the contrasts between the options were only slight formal differences, with no relevant change that could raise meaningful discussion for tenants. For planners and policymakers, the constraints imposed by government decisions – such as the new number of dwellers, the social-mix proportion, or local planning regulations – also increased the difficulties to propose relevant differences between the three proposals (Dore 2022).

Nonetheless, the visual representations of the proposal were insufficient to allow those surveyed to grasp what the final neighbourhood would actually look like. Formal aspects such as building heights, densities, public spaces, and shadows – common concerns among the residents – were difficult, if not impossible, to perceive and understand through two-dimensional maps. As such, the visual techniques of presentation increased the difficulty of understanding the variations between the options. Differences were smoothed out, as if there were no other alternatives possible.

As a result, the connections between the needs identified during the envisioning stage and three proposals were also not explicitly indicated or were at least hard to identify given its vagueness. For example, in the Visioning Report, the summary results for the ‘Culture and Community Life’ category stated that ‘Waterloo’s diversity, inclusiveness and community spirit are what make it unique, and people want to retain and strengthen these elements in the future’ (KJA 2018, 42). Given the vagueness of such statements, it was difficult to identify how the desire to ‘promote community interaction’ was reflected in the three masterplan proposed options.

Accordingly, the final results of the options testing phase for the same category of ‘Culture and Community Life’ were along very similar lines, presenting little new or additional information, despite the further consultation. Specifically, the results of the options testing for this category concluded that ‘They [participants] emphasised the importance of Waterloo remaining an authentic place with its own character and where current residents continue to enjoy a strong sense of community and belonging’. (Elton Consultation 2019, 2)

Considering the limited discussion allowed in the process, both results expressed broad and generic concepts such as ‘strong sense of community’ or ‘belonging’, which increased the difficulty of tracking what had been said in the consultations and how it applied to the options and the final masterplan. It follows that high-level statements such as ‘the promotion of strong community’ will hardly ever encounter opposition. As a result, generalization also operated as a key strategy to enable governance, insofar it allowed the claim of a totalising view despite disagreements.

In different ways, such generalised claims reflect the current post-political context, in which no real choice seems to be at stake, as the big structural conflicts of society, such as class struggle, would have been supposedly foreclosed. There are no conflicts. Importantly, design supports this narrative by promoting the appearance of choice – as in the three different options testing – while simultaneously smoothing out differences and foreclosing alternatives. In doing so, design reproduces a limited version of the meanings of diversity and choice in service of governing interests.

5. The experience of participating and being governed

The four mechanisms outlined in this article not only have an impact on the results of the process to claim more or less radical ideas. The power of design also has significant impacts on how people experienced the process of participation. While acting as a governing technology, design has crucial effects on the building of political subjectivity of participants. Mary, for example, described this process to me as highly generic, indifferent, and repetitive. She experienced what could be understood as a loop of feeling, or a cyclic quality to the process, in which people participated in apparently different activities that repeated the same kinds of questions. Nothing changed. She said ‘[participants] were basically given three choices again, and again, and again, and you had to choose something even if you didn’t like it’.

Her account contrasts strongly with the narrative of the consultation as an optimistic, coherent, and carefully staged process that evolved over time. Officially, the process was described as one in which the next stage was always built on the previous one, and the final result was always going to be necessarily better than its starting point. In contrast to this narrative, Mary’s comments, as well as the previous examination of the consultation results, demonstrate a much more circular rather than cumulative process. As Mary puts it, in the process, the residents and government did the activities without apparently creating new ideas, changing perspectives, or providing meaningful impacts for their lives. As it turned out, the consensus-driven participatory process served to perform the will to empower citizens, while actively avoiding alternatives, and thus securing the perpetuation of current socio-political arrangements (Mazé 2021, 14).

The power of governing resides precisely on this circular effect. It generates a false feeling of empowerment, in which people – including residents and co-designers – are given the space to participate, at the same time nothing really changes. No matter how, and how often we participate, the current status quo seems to be the only and the best option available. Crucially, the participatory process reinforces this tautological claim, finally leading participants into resignation.

While this false feeling of participation is not entirely new, this article has sought to unpack specific mechanisms of design processes and tools that forge this unwanted result. The chosen approach to analyse the case of Waterloo, that of governmentality, has supported this effort as it emphasised the subjectivity production involved in the arts of governing. As it should be reminded, design holds the double-faced power to manage and steer people’s experiences and subjectivities (Keshavarz and Maze 2013). In the analysed case, design held the power to either reinforce current feelings of resignation and circular effect or to dramatically change it, showing that an effective and exciting participation is possible.

6. Conclusion

This article assumed the task to empirically analyse in detail how design mediates governing power in situated contexts. Drawing on the concept of governmentality, it has dissected four central mechanisms of design deployed to support the task of governing in Waterloo. As I analysed in the article, participatory and co-design activities enabled governance through both its forms and contents: through its participatory tools and techniques, but also through the consensual narratives it generated alongside visual rhetoric.

In doing so, the article has defended the argument that the dispersion and fragmentation of state activities, observed in the localist and participatory agendas of cities, does not necessarily equal the reduction of state power. Rather, it may only suppose the rearrangement and rescaling of statecraft at the city-level in global capitalism (Brenner 2004). As a result, in this context, co-design practices and discourses were not simply appropriated by anti-democratic forces in a passive and neutral way. The choice to analyse this case from the lens of governmentality allowed us to understand how co-design practices held an agency role. They functioned as an active and productive instrument to reduce democratic deliberation, enact governing power, and conduct the political experience of participation. Accordingly, different to other approaches that might exclusively focus on post-political contexts or agonism, the concept of governmentality brought into attention the practices of self-discipline and coercion power that might also be involved in state-led forms of participation.

This rather critical perspective does not pretend to affirm that there is no alternative, consequently silencing other forms of participation currently under experimentation worldwide (see, for example, proceeding of the Participatory Design Conference of 2020, titled ‘Participation Otherwise’). However, here, I did focus on a case of hegemonic use of participation to uncover some of the mechanisms of tokenism currently in practice. Currently, there is a much-needed claim to reincorporate system-level analysis to design practices that can overlook wider political and economic dimensions. However, this same need brings with it the danger of shifting too quickly to a wider scale of analysis such neoliberalism, colonialism, or patriarchy, without properly detailing how technologies of governance may actually capture the practice of participatory design in particular places.

In this sense, the concrete and particular analysis of this case does not pretend to be easily generalised to other projects, although it may also inspire other works being undertaken in similar contexts. Indeed, the detailed and empirical description of this project pretends to effectively illuminate how governing through design actually occurs in concrete cases. Following the call to analyse the ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002), the article thus proposes to analyse the actually existing political uses of co-design.

As a result, the analysis advances the understanding of the politics of participation and design not by proposing alternative agendas nor new or existing methods to overcome or manage what are indeed highly complex and open-ended conflicts. Rather, it examines the troubling ways in which the institutionalisation of participation is unfolding, in practice, in neoliberal cities. In doing so, it contributes to the building of analytical tools for designers’ own critical positioning in neoliberal contexts. Finally, it also supports future works in identifying technologies of governance to eventually reformulate or reframe design questions and practices. Ultimately, it hopes to support the discontinuity of undifferentiated experiences of participation that only reproduce current feelings of resignation and disbelief towards democratic institutions.

Acknowledgments

I thank the Waterloo community for hosting my fieldwork, and I pay my respect to the traditional custodians of the lands I work on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I also thank my supervisors Greg Downey (Macquarie University), Joan Josep Pujada (Universidad Rovira i Virgili), and Jesús Sanz (Complutense University) for their support and guidance during this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Macquarie University Cotutelle Research Excellence Scholarship and a Macquarie University Fieldwork Research Grant.

Notes

1. Ethical clearance was provided to undertake this fieldwork by the Arts Subcommittee of Macquarie University with approval number 52019356612707.

2. I use throughout the text pseudonyms.