ABSTRACT
What makes users into participating citizens in the context of building today’s cities? What role can we collectively play in giving form to architectural spaces? What types of interactions are required for genuine participation to take place? Approaches to architectural or urban projects that favor citizen participation currently form a vast and growing repertoire at international level. These approaches rest on terms such as agency, action, and participation, concepts that too often tend to remain vaguely defined. In this chapter, I propose a framework to examine modes of collective action and participation through a synthetic reading of Paul Ricœur’s The Course of Recognition. Ricœur’s careful study of the various semantic twists taken by the term “recognition” lays the ground for an understanding of man as capable, where human life unfolds through action, as praxis. Ricœur pointedly connects how we produce knowledge and meaning to our capacity to act (pouvoir faire) understood, in turn, as an outcome of our possibility to speak, to narrate ourselves and our experiences (pouvoir dire, pouvoir raconteur, pouvoir se raconter). It is through such processes—using words and doing deeds—that we reclaim the right to see our capacities recognized, thus becoming capable. Actualizing our agency as designers, as users and as citizens therefore requires that we engage in acts of language such as narrating ourselves and fictionalizing the everyday, thus embracing literary imagination as a collectively deployed spatializing skill.
