From participation to relational infrastructuring: Rethinking inclusion in contemporary placemaking

This article advances a relational understanding of placemaking, examining how inclusive urban development emerges through the interplay of institutional structures, civic agency, and participatory design. Moving beyond the binary of top-down versus bottom-up planning, the study proposes the Relational Placemaking for Inclusion (RPI) framework, which comprises three interdependent dimensions: temporality, institutional resonance, and design agency. Drawing on three European case studies the article explores how inclusion is enacted, negotiated, and sometimes constrained across diverse urban contexts. The analysis shows that participation alone does not yield inclusive outcomes; rather, inclusion emerges when civic relationships extend beyond project cycles, institutions absorb and legitimate emergent practices, and mediators curate participation in ways that recognize plural knowledge and attend to power. By reframing placemaking as relational infrastructuring, the article advances a socio-technical understanding of how public space is co-produced and how placemaking can provoke institutional and societal transformation. It concludes with propositions for shifting placemaking analysis from events to relationships and from outputs to capabilities, offering guidance for scaling inclusive placemaking in diverse governance settings.