Reimagining the Architect’s Role: Participatory Design as a Pathway to Transformative Resilience in Flood-Prone Communities

This paper reimagines the architect’s role in fostering transformative resilience in flood-prone regional communities in Australia by examining how architects engage with participatory design processes. While participatory design is increasingly adopted to engage communities in disaster recovery, the role of architects within these processes—and the nature of their agency—remains under-examined. Using Critical Interpretive Synthesis, this paper brings together the literature across participatory design, transformative resilience, and architectural agency to critically examine why conventional, expert-led architecture practice models may limit transformative resilience potential. Drawing on relational and Indigenous knowledge frameworks alongside participatory design and the resilience literature, and examining the synthesis against published evidence from the 2022 Northern Rivers floods, the paper presents a conceptual exploration of how architectural practice might evolve to support more inclusive, adaptive, and community-driven approaches to recovery. By providing a theoretical bridge between disaster resilience scholarship and architectural practice, the paper proposes an emerging framework for practice that challenges traditional assumptions of architectural authorship and contributes to longer-term resilience-building. In doing so, the paper offers a provocation for rethinking architectural roles in times of crisis and identifies directions for future research and engagement.