Friction as fertiliser: Reframing participation in placemaking

The mainstream narrative surrounding participation and inclusion in placemaking and urban regeneration often presents an optimistic, "sugar-coated" account of participatory processes. In practice, public spaces are arenas where diverse needs, values, and perspectives coexist, and the process of 'making place' frequently surfaces conflict, tension, and discomfort. This paper advances that such friction should not be dismissed, but understood as a crucial expression of democratic agonism. Following Mouffe (2000), democratic participation is not about achieving unanimity, but about negotiating and acknowledging differences through debate and contestation. Nonetheless, contemporary discourses on participatory design and placemaking rarely account for the productive potential of conflict, and implementations often seek to smooth over discomfort rather than engage with it. At Placemaking Week 2025, urban changemakers were invited to reflect on the roles of institutional, civic, and ecological actors in shaping socially just, climate-adaptive urban interventions. The workshop, titled “Friction as Fertilizer, Reframing Resilience for Urban Coexistence” used interactive exercises and reflexivity - ecosystem mapping, and reflection on power and positionality - to uncover differing perspectives. Crucially, it did not aim to solve problems or reach consensus. Instead, participants were encouraged to sit with unresolved tensions and the discomfort of power dynamics as they arose. Feedback from the session showed high engagement and energy, with participants describing it as "therapeutic" and "essential at the end of every project". The results demonstrate how participatory methods can intentionally foreground friction, using discomfort as a tool for learning and as a source of transformative energy. Rather than concluding with resolution, this paper reframes placemaking as a site of friction, repair, and confrontation in public space, proposing coexistence as a productive act of care and resistance (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Drawing on Tsing's (2015) concept of the assemblage — open-ended ecological gatherings of organisms that share space, follow different rhythms, and influence one another not in competition but in juxtaposition — the paper proposes that urban coexistence need not require harmony or consensus, but rather the capacity to remain in generative relation across difference. Inspired by the way the matsutake mushroom thrives in disturbed and damaged landscapes, the discussion advances that conflict, when surfaced and held, can fertilise new forms of collaborative imagining. The paper therefore argues that participatory design can operate as a deliberate intervention in the rhythms and relations of urban life — not resolving controversy, but composing provisional arrangements that accommodate ongoing contestation, repair, and learning, and in doing so, embracing friction as a generative resource rather than a problem to be solved.