Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem
Participatory planning and co-creation increasingly seek to involve residents directly in shaping their living environments. Living labs extend this ambition by situating participation in real-life settings and organising it around experimentation, learning and iteration (Steen & van Bueren, 2017; Voytenko et al., 2016). Urban experimentation similarly emphasises learning through practice under conditions in which outcomes cannot be fully known in advance (Sengers et al., 2016).
Such approaches are particularly relevant to shared residential spaces. The social value of space does not derive from physical design alone but develops through relationships between spatial characteristics, uses and social behaviour (Mehta, 2007). Shared spaces therefore acquire meaning through everyday appropriation, interaction and negotiation, making co-creation potentially important for shaping both their material organisation and collective use.
Co-creation, experimentation and iteration may presume sustained engagement, confidence in articulating needs, participation in collective deliberation, tolerance of provisional outcomes and willingness to revisit decisions. These conditions cannot necessarily be assumed in social-housing contexts characterised by socio-economic precarity, where participation takes place alongside heterogeneous household needs, responsibilities, resources and expectations. Formal opportunities to participate may therefore not translate into equivalent capacities to influence the process. The main research questions therefore is how do participatory approaches built around sustained engagement, deliberation, experimentation and iteration function in a social-housing context characterised by socio-economic precarity?
We address this question through RECOSS (Resident Co-Creation of Shared Spaces), a living-lab experiment in a social-housing residence in Hosingen, Luxembourg, managed by the Fondation pour l’accès au logement (FAL). Six households with children share an approximately 20 m² indoor common room and 50 m² outdoor multi-use space. RECOSS supports residents in defining how these spaces could be used, organised and collectively governed. The paper examines participatory frictions - moments when methodological expectations encounter the everyday conditions under which participation occurs.
Conceptual framework
Living labs conceptualise participation as experimentation and learning in real-life settings. Rather than implementing fully specified solutions, experimentation can reformulate problems, constraints and possible responses as interventions encounter real-world conditions (Sengers et al., 2016). Shared residential space adds a relational dimension. Mehta (2007) demonstrates that social activity emerges through relationships between physical settings, uses and social practices. Consequently, creating a shared space involves more than designing its physical configuration; it also requires negotiating how it is appropriated, used and maintained. Perl’s (2021) understanding of solidarity extends this argument by focusing on the relationships and commitments through which collective responsibility is produced, not simply assuming solidarity because people share a place. For RECOSS, this is important because co-residence does not automatically produce agreement over access, maintenance, scheduling, costs or responsibilities. Shared-space governance requires continuing negotiation between household needs and collective commitments.
Socio-economic precarity is therefore approached not as an individual deficiency, nor as synonymous with social-housing tenure, but as part of the unequal and potentially unstable everyday circumstances within which participation takes place. We use participatory friction to describe moments when the sequencing, assumptions or demands of participatory methodologies do not align easily with these circumstances. This perspective shifts attention from whether residents participate “correctly” towards how participatory methods themselves function and adapt.
Methods
RECOSS is a participatory qualitative study organised as a living lab. Its methodological architecture operates at three interconnected levels.
At the overall process level, the Double Diamond guided the design of four workshops, corresponding to Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. Discover explored residents’ experiences, needs and initial ideas; Define revisited and prioritised these inputs; Develop translated possibilities into spatial configurations and prototypes; and Deliver tests and evaluates spatial and governance arrangements through everyday use. The Double Diamond thus provides a macro-level scaffold rather than a rigid linear sequence.
Within each workshop, Design Thinking structured the participatory activities. Residents were encouraged to share experiences and needs, generate possibilities, materialise ideas and reflect on potential interventions through discussions, post-its, spatial mapping, annotated plans, co-design and in-situ prototyping. Workshop design sought to accommodate heterogeneity in household, age, gender and cultural background, including adults’ and children’s preferences, through adaptable facilitation, communication and participant grouping.
Collective deliberation additionally incorporated sociocratic principles of consent-based decision-making. Residents could raise objections and modify proposals in response to concerns, instead of relying solely on majority preference. Sociocratic decision-making seeks consent through the absence of reasoned objections (Romme, 1995), enabling minority concerns to affect proposals instead of being automatically overridden.
Analysis combines thematic analysis with qualitative process tracing across the four workshops, examining how needs and proposals change, how residents engage with different activities, how differences are negotiated, and where the anticipated methodological progression is interrupted or revisited.
Results
The findings reveal several participatory frictions. First, the anticipated separation between Discover and Define was difficult to maintain. Residents frequently moved directly from everyday needs towards concrete solutions and introduced concerns extending beyond what the shared-space project could address. This questions the methodological expectation that problems and solutions can be separated through predefined participatory stages. Second, formal opportunities for participation did not generate equivalent participation. Engagement was active but uneven, with differences in confidence and voice despite inclusive facilitation and consent-oriented decision-making. This distinguishes procedural inclusion—having opportunities to speak or object—from substantive capacity to influence collective decisions. Sociocratic procedures can prevent simple majority domination but cannot automatically eliminate inequalities in confidence or engagement.
Third, material prototyping produced a different form of participation. Moving from abstract discussion to annotated plans and full-scale configurations made proposals tangible. Ideas that appeared feasible in discussion encountered practical spatial constraints, requiring adjustment and negotiation. Prototyping therefore became a form of inquiry rather than merely representing previously agreed solutions. Concrete spatialisation appeared to enable forms of engagement that were more difficult through abstract deliberation alone.
Fourth, a temporal friction emerged between iterative experimentation and expectations for tangible outcomes. Living-lab and Design Thinking approaches depend on repeated engagement, testing and revision, while participation and trust take time. Residents, however, expected participation to generate visible improvements. Research time and everyday expectations of change therefore did not always correspond.
Finally, governance became inseparable from spatial design. As proposals became concrete, discussions shifted towards access, scheduling, cleaning, supervision, maintenance, energy and costs. Co-creation therefore required residents not only to express spatial preferences but also to negotiate continuing responsibilities towards one another.
Discussion and conclusion
RECOSS suggests that participatory methodologies cannot be assessed independently from the conditions under which participation occurs. The Double Diamond provided a useful macro-level scaffold but did not describe a linear empirical process. Design Thinking activities based on abstract articulation generated greater friction, whereas material and in-situ prototyping supported more concrete negotiation. Sociocratic procedures created formal opportunities for minority positions to influence decisions but did not automatically overcome differences in confidence and voice.
These findings do not suggest that residents experiencing socio-economic precarity are unwilling or unable to participate, nor that co-creation simply failed. They demonstrate that different methodological components make different demands on participants and function differently when encountering everyday conditions of participation.
Co-creation of shared space also has both a spatial and relational outcome. The RECOSS case suggests that the durability of a co-created intervention depends not only on residents’ influence over design but also on the relationships and commitments through which it is subsequently governed. Perl’s (2021) understanding of solidarity as sustained through continuing commitments is useful here. Shared space cannot rely on a single moment of collective agreement; its everyday functioning depends on residents repeatedly negotiating responsibilities towards one another and the shared resource. The Deliver phase therefore tests not only whether spatial interventions work, but whether commitments produced through co-creation can be sustained in everyday practice.
RECOSS consequently suggests that the central question is not simply whether a participatory method “works,” but which forms of participation work for whom, under what conditions, and with what adaptations. Equitable co-creation may require shorter feedback loops, earlier materialisation, flexible modes of engagement and methods capable of moving backwards and forwards between discovery, definition, development and delivery. Participation itself becomes part of the uncertainty of urban experimentation: engagement varies, priorities change, methodological stages overlap and collective agreements encounter everyday routines. The challenge is therefore not simply to include residents within established participatory methodologies, but to make those methodologies responsive to unequal and uncertain conditions of everyday participation.
Keywords: living labs; co-creation; social housing; socio-economic precarity; participatory planning
References
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