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

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.