Designing for Social Reproduction: Towards the Sustainment of Public Space Interventions in Mexico City's Colonias Populares

While Participatory Design (PD) orients its interest in the public space and infrastructuring–the ongoing work sustaining collaborative efforts over time–it has yet to address the ‘invisible’ reproductive work within its processes. The paper fills this gap through retrospectively examining an ongoing project to co-create tactical public space interventions in Mexico City's colonias populares. Articulating the project's journey via seven reproductive design activities central to sustaining the project and each intervention over time (experimental, territorial, playful, relational, articulating, translating, and maintaining), it recovers infrastructuring's feminist grounding and applies a social reproduction lens to spotlight the ‘invisible’ reproductive work extending beyond more ‘visible’ productive design practices. Alongside this contribution, it incorporates nuance-layered insight into how ‘invisible’ work manifests in the context of public space interventions on the ground to inform design practice in pursuit of a more critical and political approach to feminist social reproduction-anchored infrastructuring in PD.