Participatory gentrification: how participatory design mechanisms legitimize neighborhood change in Chinese urban regeneration

Abstract

Abstract

Participatory Design is widely promoted as a democratic tool for empowering communities in urban regeneration. However, growing evidence suggests that participatory processes may reproduce existing hierarchies and contribute to exclusionary neighborhood change. This study advances the concept of participatory gentrification to explain how Participatory Design becomes implicated in gentrification not through direct displacement, but through procedural and epistemic filtering embedded in participatory practices. Drawing on 71 interviews across four community cases in Shanghai and Chengdu, supplemented by consumption landscape indicators, the analysis identifies nine filtering mechanisms operating across three participatory stages: initiation-phase barriers that shape who enters the process, participation-phase filters that tend to privilege specialized forms of knowledge, and leadership-phase screening that aligns outcomes with prevailing market and administrative logics. These mechanisms progressively narrow legitimate participation and align design outcomes with dominant governance or market structures. The findings show that Participatory Design and gentrification are co-constitutive processes: participatory practices can legitimize and accelerate neighborhood change by translating diverse community claims into institutionally acceptable forms. Rather than mitigating exclusion, participation may generate procedural legitimacy for symbolic, cultural, or material displacement. By providing a mechanism-based account of how participation shapes urban transformation, this study challenges normative assumptions in participatory governance scholarship and offers analytical tools for evaluating Participatory Design's substantive impacts in state-led institutional and developmental realities of China and the wider Global South.