Users with/out bodies: The material politics of social differentiation in participatory planning and architecture from the performative arts

‘Socially engaged’ participatory design projects from the performative arts are often seen as producers of ‘other’ knowledge. This encompasses embodied, affective and non-representational dimensions of architectural knowledge on future dwelling. Such understanding of what the arts do is in opposition to rationalizations and particularly the scaled concept of a pre-social singularised future inhabitant—the ‘user’—as imputed by modern(ist) architecture and urban planning practices. This paper proposes a combined argument rooted in body sociology by showing that the incorporation of future inhabitants in architectural design processes is a material struggle for social difference around the abstract concept of the ‘user’. It is a political dynamic that concerns all stakeholders in the design processes. The case is called ‘Planbude’, a participatory project in Hamburg, which questions the conventional self-referential body techniques and methods of embodying design in the profession of architects. It will be shown that Planbude’s intervention into the conventions of design processes is not about the aesthetic ‘othering’ of knowledge production only. It will be argued that the members of Planbude have strong practical competences in translating their research results into design processes by critically dealing with the conventional methods of architects and planners. Among all stakeholders this leads to a cultural sensibility and to considerations of differentiated bodily needs in the politics of an architectural design process.