UC Irvine

This dissertation examines how design and construction practices become techniques for building democracy in Barcelona. It draws on 21 months of ethnographic field research with participatory architecture studios and grassroots social movements engaged in urban place-making, including participant-observation, open-ended interviews, and audio and video recordings of participatory design meetings and construction workshops. The dissertation explores how residents and experts use building practices to intermingle community-making, democratic deliberation, and the production of lay expertise.

While residents’ participation has been a component of urban planning in Barcelona since the 1980s, this dissertation finds that for many of Barcelona’s residents, emergent forms of participatory design and construction that arose in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis offer a means of creating alternative political and economic futures. Through participatory architecture and collective construction, collaborative experiments in making something new from the residues of post-industrial and gentrifying landscapes become exercises in practical democracy. I demonstrate that residents and architects make design processes into spaces of encounter where finding ways to agree on urban futures also cultivates new relationships. As residents build a city that offers different ways of living together, they reanimate both empty urban spaces and design and construction processes as shelters for care work and community-making.