From Listening to Co-Production: Participatory Tools as Social and Economic Infrastructure in Bangkok

Abstract: This article examines how participatory tools can move beyond consultation to function as forms of co-production in urban design in Bangkok, Thailand. Drawing on participatory design, co-production, design justice, and debates on social infrastructure, it argues that participatory tools are not neutral mechanisms for collecting opinion but socio-technical infrastructures that mediate recognition, legibility, translation, and public value. The study is based on a qualitative case analysis of a Bangkok-based participatory design initiative that combined in-person workshops, digital interface development, dashboard-based aggregation, cross-community comparison, and longer-term public dissemination. Rather than treating these project materials as passive records, the article reads them as mediating artifacts through which community knowledge was reformulated into institutionally actionable forms. The findings show, first, that workshop participation expanded recognition beyond the narrow logic of consultation; second, that interface design increased the legibility of community-generated knowledge while also filtering meaning; third, that the dashboard system created continuity by storing and recirculating participatory outputs across engagements; fourth, that a shared output framework enabled comparison across communities without collapsing local specificity; and fifth, that the initiative generated both social and economic value over time through trust-building, stewardship, better fit between intervention and need, and broader public circulation. The article concludes that the democratic promise of participatory design lies not in listening alone, but in building procedural, visual, and institutional conditions through which communities can shape decisions, redistribute recognition, and participate substantively in the making of the city.