Depicting concurrency between the participatory and the strategic design practice within the urban context

The context of everyday urban life is the cradle of more democratic social changes, and on which design practice aimed at the regeneration of urban space towards something more democratic, inclusive, participative and resilient has to focus. However, design practice within the city has hardly been successful from this perspective. In this paper a path to strengthening design practice within the urban context is presented by identifying the points of concurrency and enrichment between strategic design from the perspective of the ecosystem and the participatory design approach of infrastructuring agonistic public spaces. Political design and agonistic democracy are the theoretical thread running in the background of the discussion here presented that results in affirming the need to qualify metadesign, within strategic design, as infrastructuring agonistic public spaces when acting within the city, as well as to amplify the potentiality of the suggested practice through the integration of prototyping and scenario building. Keywords: strategic design, infrastructuring, agonistic public spaces, urban context.