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

1 Introduction

Participatory Design (PD) is widely promoted as a democratic strategy for empowering communities and enhancing inclusiveness in urban regeneration. By integrating diverse stakeholders into design and decision-making, PD is expected to reshape spatial production through co-creation rather than top-down intervention (Simonsen and Robertson, 2013; Lindström and Ståhl, 2020). Within this normative vision, participation is assumed to mitigate power asymmetries, address displacement, and generate more equitable urban outcomes (Pérez et al., 2018).

Yet, growing empirical evidence suggests that these democratic promises are difficult to sustain in practice. Rather than redistributing power, participatory processes are frequently embedded within existing social hierarchies, institutional logics, and market pressures, producing selective inclusion and uneven influence (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Huybrechts et al., 2017; Akama et al., 2024). As a result, PD often functions less as a transformative democratic practice than as a governance technique that legitimizes predetermined agendas.

These tensions become particularly acute in contexts of urban regeneration, where participatory initiatives unfold alongside processes of reinvestment, cultural revalorization, and intensified gentrification pressures. While participation is frequently mobilized to address displacement and social exclusion, studies increasingly show that participatory practices can reproduce inequality by privileging actors with greater cultural, social, or professional capital (Checker, 2011; Sachs et al., 2022). In such contexts, participation does not simply coexist with gentrification but may actively shape how neighborhood change is justified, negotiated, and normalized.

Gentrification scholarship has long demonstrated that displacement extends beyond physical relocation to include symbolic, cultural, and political forms of exclusion (Zukin, 1995; Atkinson, 2015; Hyra, 2015). Design interventions and participatory processes can play a central role in this transformation by embedding middle-class preferences and aesthetic norms into urban space, thereby reconfiguring whose claims to place are recognized as legitimate (De Cesari and Dimova, 2019). Participation, in this sense, risks becoming a cultural and procedural mechanism through which exclusionary neighborhood change is enacted and legitimized.

Despite extensive research on both participatory governance and gentrification, existing scholarship offers limited insight into how PD practices themselves mediate neighborhood change (Checker, 2011; Turnhout et al., 2020; Lauermann and Mallak, 2023). Studies of participation tend to focus on procedural quality, inclusiveness, or power distribution within participatory processes (Arnstein, 1969; Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Udoewa, 2022), while gentrification research primarily examines demographic shifts, market dynamics, or spatial outcomes (Zukin, 1995; Atkinson, 2015; Hirsch et al., 2021). What remains underexplored is a mechanism-based understanding of how participatory practices—through their procedures, knowledge hierarchies, and evaluative criteria—actively shape, legitimize, or accelerate gentrification.

This gap is particularly consequential in Global South contexts driven by rapid urban regeneration. In such settings, PD does not operate as an autonomous democratic arena but is structured by administrative performance metrics, funding regimes, and governance priorities (Wu and Zhang, 2022; Zhao et al., 2023). These conditions raise critical questions about whether participation mitigates exclusion or instead transforms diverse community claims into institutionally acceptable forms that align with dominant interests.

This paper argues that PD can function as a mechanism of gentrification. To capture this dynamic, it advances the concept of participatory gentrification, defined as a process in which participatory practices generate procedural legitimacy for exclusionary neighborhood change through cumulative procedural and epistemic filtering. Rather than producing displacement through direct market forces alone, participatory gentrification operates by progressively narrowing who can participate, what forms of knowledge are recognized, and which design outcomes are deemed feasible or legitimate.

By foregrounding mechanisms rather than intentions, this concept reframes participation not as a normative solution to gentrification but as a constitutive element in the governance of urban transformation. It highlights how participation may simultaneously expand in form while contracting in substance, enabling symbolic, cultural, or material displacement to occur under the guise of democratic inclusion. While gentrification is shaped by a range of structural forces, including land markets, policy regimes, and capital flows (Zukin, 1995; Atkinson, 2015; Hyra, 2015), the concept identifies a distinct legitimation pathway in which procedural legitimacy, generated within the participatory process itself, operates as a constitutive driver of this legitimation and shapes the form and contestability of exclusionary neighborhood change.

Empirically, the study examines four community cases in Shanghai and Chengdu, drawing on 71 interviews with residents, designers, officials, and NGO practitioners. It integrates the PACER framework for assessing perceived gentrification with Udoewa's three-stage model of participatory processes to situate participatory mechanisms within differentiated neighborhood change contexts. This sequential analytical approach enables the study to trace how participatory practices intersect with market-driven, culturally driven, or state-led gentrification pressures.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews scholarship on PD, power, and gentrification, identifying conceptual limitations in existing approaches. Section 3 outlines the research design and methodology. Section 4 presents empirical findings on neighborhood change and participatory mechanisms. Section 5 develops a theory of participatory gentrification and discusses its implications for participatory governance and urban studies. Section 6 concludes with reflections for policy and future research.

2 Literature review

2.1 Participatory design and gentrification

Participatory Design has traditionally been positioned as a democratizing methodology that enables marginalized users to shape design outcomes through dialogue, co-creation, and collective decision-making (Simonsen and Robertson, 2013; Correia and Yusop, 2008). Ideally, this approach reframes residents from passive beneficiaries of urban interventions into active knowledge producers (Habermas, 1984; McKercher, 2020). By centering their lived experiences, proponents argue that participation can redress power imbalances, boost legitimacy, and ensure social sustainability.

Yet the realization of this potential has been uneven. In contexts with mature planning frameworks, Participatory Design has benefited from institutional support and legal mechanisms for participation. In the Global South, however, the conditions are more contested. Participatory projects often struggle with structural and epistemological barriers that dilute their transformative ambitions (Huybrechts et al., 2017; Akama et al., 2024). Instead of truly redistributing power, participation frequently morphs into a governance technology that manages dissent, manufactures consensus, and legitimizes objectives that were decided in advance (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Concepts such as “packaged participation” and “post-political participation” capture how participatory formats can remain intact while substantive power relations remain unchanged (Swyngedouw, 2018; Zhao et al., 2023).

These concerns are amplified by decolonial critiques. Scholars such as Smith et al. (2024) argue that Participatory Design frequently carries Western epistemologies into contexts with distinct indigenous knowledge systems, thereby reinforcing epistemic injustice. Von Busch and Palmås (2023) further contend that Participatory Design has been institutionalized within neoliberal logics, turning participation into a managerial technique that absorbs dissent rather than fostering genuine transformation. Together, these critiques underscore the importance of interrogating whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and how power circulates within participatory processes.

In urban regeneration contexts, these dynamics intersect with gentrification processes that extend well beyond class-based residential succession driven by capital reinvestment (Glass, 1964). Gentrification now encompasses cultural, symbolic, and experiential forms of displacement (Zukin, 1995; Atkinson, 2015; Hyra, 2015). Design interventions play a central role in this transformation by embedding particular aesthetic norms, consumption practices, and imaginaries into urban space, thereby reshaping whose claims to place are recognized as legitimate (De Cesari and Dimova, 2019).

Consequently, participation sits in an ambivalent position. On one side, it is promoted as a buffer against displacement. On the other, critical studies caution that it often privileges specific actors—those with higher cultural, social, or professional capital (Harvey, 2005; Newman and Clarke, 2009; Sachs et al., 2022). Participation enables these groups to shape regeneration agendas more effectively. It becomes an aestheticized performance that negotiates and normalizes neighborhood change rather than contesting it (Checker, 2011; Campkin and Marshall, 2017).

China's state-directed model intensifies these dynamics. Here, PD often operates as a project-based instrument, evaluated by performance indicators rather than substantive empowerment (Wu and Zhang, 2022; Zhou, 2014). The risk is that participatory processes merely translate diverse community claims into administratively manageable inputs, preserving existing power hierarchies while creating an appearance of inclusion (Zhao et al., 2023). Disparities in economic and cultural capital can worsen symbolic marginalization (Wu et al., 2016). Participation functions less as a tool for redistribution and more as a mode of governance, rendering neighborhood change both legitimate and controllable.

Recent scholarship has moved toward examining the relationship between participatory processes and neighborhood change more directly. Checker (2011) showed that ostensibly neutral sustainability planning in New York shared operational logics with gentrification, producing displacement under the appearance of community improvement. Lauermann and Mallak (2023), reviewing elite capture in urban governance, identified the co-optation of participatory planning as one of four strategies through which urban institutions are subverted to serve private interests, and illustrated these dynamics with gentrification cases. Turnhout et al. (2020) argued that depoliticization within co-production processes tends to reinforce rather than mitigate existing power asymmetries. These contributions suggest that participation and neighborhood change cannot be treated as analytically independent domains.

Despite these advances, existing research has not yet traced how the specific procedural mechanisms of participatory design interact with governance and market structures to produce differentiated neighborhood outcomes at the community scale. Addressing this gap requires analytical frameworks capable of linking participatory processes to gentrification contexts through explicit causal mechanisms, an issue taken up in the following section. While these related strands have examined how exclusion arises within PD, within gentrification processes, and at their intersection (Checker, 2011; Lauermann and Mallak, 2023; Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, 2024), participatory gentrification differs in identifying a process in which procedural legitimacy, generated through routinely functioning participation, operates as a partial but distinctive driver of exclusionary outcomes that cannot be reduced to market or administrative logics.

2.2 Analytical framework

Existing scholarship on PD and gentrification can be broadly grouped into three analytical strands, each offering important insights while leaving critical limitations unresolved (Table 1). First, process-oriented frameworks assess participation in terms of inclusiveness, deliberative quality, or facilitation design (Arnstein, 1969; Udoewa, 2022; Kesdi and Gunes, 2024; Bua and Bussu, 2021). While valuable for evaluating procedural performance, these approaches tend to assume that improving participatory quality will automatically lead to more equitable outcomes. They rarely interrogate how structural power asymmetries shape whose contributions ultimately influence spatial decisions. Second, power-analytic frameworks—including empowerment-oriented evaluations, critical governance approaches, and post-political analyses—provide nuanced accounts of how authority and decision-making power are distributed within participatory processes (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Swyngedouw, 2018; Zhao et al., 2023; Turnhout et al., 2020). However, these approaches largely remain intra-process in scope. They offer limited capacity to trace how participatory dynamics translate into broader neighborhood transformations or to assess whether participatory processes themselves contribute to exclusionary spatial outcomes.

Table 1. Analytical strands in PD and gentrification research.

Third, critical gentrification research has developed sophisticated tools to capture displacement, cultural change, and residents' perceptions of neighborhood transformation. Instruments such as PACER foreground experiential dimensions of gentrification by examining changes in social relations, built environments, and affordability pressures (Hirsch et al., 2021). Studies of political participation in gentrifying neighborhoods have shown how newcomers can dominate local decision-making (Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, 2024), while analyses of elite capture have documented how participatory planning may be co-opted to serve private interests (Lauermann and Mallak, 2023). Yet these approaches primarily describe outcomes or identify instances of co-optation rather than tracing how the routine operational procedures of participatory design mediate neighborhood change.

Taken together, these strands reveal complementary limitations: process-oriented and power-analytic frameworks offer tools for examining participatory dynamics but do not situate them within specific neighborhood change contexts, while gentrification research provides instruments for characterizing neighborhood change but does not trace the participatory processes through which change is governed. Linking these two sides requires combining tools from both traditions. This study therefore integrates two complementary frameworks through a sequential analytical logic (Figure 1): the PACER framework for establishing the gentrification context of each community, and Udoewa's three-stage model for tracing participatory mechanisms. Rather than merging these frameworks into a single hybrid model, the study deploys them in a complementary sequence to serve distinct analytical purposes. PACER is first used to establish the gentrification context of each community by assessing residents' perceptions across four dimensions: perception, social environment, built environment, and affordability. This step situates participatory practices within empirically grounded neighborhood trajectories, recognizing that participatory mechanisms operate differently under varying gentrification pressures. Udoewa's framework is then applied to analyze participatory mechanisms across three stages—initiation, participation, and leadership. This stage-based lens enables systematic identification of procedural and epistemic filtering mechanisms, including participation control, cognitive authority, assessment filtering, and administrative screening. By situating these mechanisms within differentiated gentrification contexts identified through PACER, the framework makes it possible to trace how participatory practices align with, amplify, or stabilize market-driven, culturally driven, or state-led forms of neighborhood change.

This sequential integration constitutes a methodological contribution. It moves beyond static assessments of participatory quality or descriptive accounts of gentrification outcomes by enabling a mechanism-based analysis of how participation shapes urban transformation. Rather than asking whether participation is inclusive or empowering in abstract terms, the framework asks how participatory procedures interact with existing neighborhood dynamics to produce specific spatial consequences.

The integrated framework provides analytical coherence for the study's central concept of participatory gentrification. By linking participatory stages to neighborhood change trajectories, it reveals how cumulative filtering across participation can generate procedural legitimacy for exclusionary outcomes. In doing so, the framework establishes a basis for examining participation not merely as a normative ideal, but as an operative mechanism within the governance of urban regeneration. Crucially, the sequential deployment of PACER and Udoewa is not a neutral juxtaposition: gentrification contexts identified through PACER are theorized to actively shape, rather than merely accompany, the filtering configurations that emerge within Udoewa's three stages. This study argues that different gentrification contexts embed participatory processes within distinct institutional logics that condition which filtering mechanisms become dominant. The empirical investigation of this interactive relationship across the four cases is developed in Section 4 and theorized in Section 5.

3 Research methodology

3.1 Case selection

Shanghai and Chengdu were selected as comparative research sites to capture variation in governance arrangements and PD implementation within China's urban regeneration landscape. Both cities are recognized as pioneers in community-scale regeneration and have institutionalized PD as part of renewal policy experimentation. However, they differ markedly in governance orientation: Shanghai emphasizes government-led revitalization with strong administrative steering, while Chengdu places greater emphasis on community self-governance and grassroots participation. This contrast enables examination of how participatory mechanisms operate under different institutional conditions. Within these cities, four communities—Luhu, Dongming, Xinhua, and Yulin—were selected to represent distinct configurations of governance, participation, and neighborhood change (see Figure 2). Blue points in each community panel indicate consumption-oriented establishments whose distributional patterns are analyzed as contextual indicators in Section 4.1. Luhu exemplifies a developer-led, professionally curated participatory model; Dongming represents a government-initiated regeneration project characterized by administrative oversight; Xinhua reflects NGO-facilitated participation in a culturally heterogeneous neighborhood; and Yulin illustrates market-driven participation mediated by third-party organizations within a rapidly commercializing district. These cases were selected based on four criteria: (1) their designation as recognized pilots of PD practices, (2) the maturity and visibility of participatory activities, (3) observable neighborhood transformation that allows assessment of gentrification dynamics, and (4) secure field access enabling sustained and comparative data collection. Together, the cases enable systematic comparison of how participatory mechanisms align with or counteract gentrification pressures across differentiated institutional contexts.

Table 2 summarizes the demographic, housing-market, and governance profiles of the four case communities. Non-local hukou ratios are broadly comparable across sites (55–61%), suggesting that variation in gentrification trajectories is driven less by the volume of in-migration than by its socioeconomic composition. Participatory activities in these communities are not anchored to single named policy programs but emerge from ongoing, multi-year institutional arrangements involving diverse facilitating organizations (Table 2).

Table 2. Baseline profiles of the four case communities.

Population: 7th National Census (2020), street level. Aged 65+: district level. Housing: district-level listing prices; Shanghai from Beike, Chengdu from Anjuke, April 2026.^a Huayang Subdistrict; Luhu is one development within it.

3.2 Data collection

Data collection employed a multi-source qualitative strategy designed to capture both lived experiences of neighborhood change and the institutional logics shaping PD processes. A total of 71 semi-structured interviews were conducted between August 2024 and July 2025. Resident interviews included both long-term residents and newcomers to ensure coverage of heterogeneous perspectives on participation, displacement, and neighborhood transformation. These interviews focused on experiences of spatial change, access to participatory activities, perceptions of inclusion or exclusion, and interpretations of shifting community identity.

In parallel, interviews were conducted with designers, planners, NGO practitioners, and community workers involved in participatory initiatives. These institutional actors provided insight into the objectives, procedural structures, and constraints governing PD implementation. All interviews lasted between 45 and 120 minutes, were conducted in familiar environments, and were recorded with informed consent. An anonymized coding system was applied to all transcripts to protect participant privacy.

Supplementary consumption landscape data were collected following the interview phase to contextualize the affordability dynamics assessed through the PACER framework. Following Dong et al. (2019), who demonstrated that restaurant data reliably capture street-level socioeconomic variation across Chinese cities, and Glaeser et al. (2018), who showed that shifts in consumer-service composition function as leading indicators of neighborhood change, restaurant pricing and cuisine-category data were collected as observable proxies for neighborhood-level socioeconomic differentiation. Restaurant pricing and platform-assigned cuisine-category data were obtained from Dianping (dianping.com) for dining establishments operating within each community boundary at the time of data collection. Establishments were systematically surveyed within each site (initial pool N = 478); after excluding chain fast-food outlets, beverage-only shops, and bakeries, 411 eligible restaurants remained. These data serve as a cross-sectional characterization of each community's consumption landscape, contextualizing—rather than measuring—the neighborhood change trajectories identified through interview analysis.

3.3 Data analysis

Qualitative coding employed MAXQDA software and proceeded through iterative stages across all interview data (Kuckartz and Rädiker, 2019; Krippendorff, 2019). In the initial open coding stage, interview transcripts were systematically reviewed to identify and label relevant concepts without imposing predetermined categories. The axial coding stage then organized these initial codes according to established analytical frameworks, grouping related concepts to form thematic clusters. The coding process traced discourse patterns across three analytical levels: initiation, participation, and leadership.

This approach mapped the combinations of mechanisms and contextual conditions under which specific patterns emerge. To examine configurational relationships rather than isolated frequency patterns, this study employed code co-occurrence network analysis (Osgood et al., 1957; Shaffer et al., 2016). To examine discursive patterns within the participatory process, word frequency analysis identified gentrification-related themes using MAXQDA's frequency analysis tools. Normalized frequency scores controlled for interview length variation (raw frequency ÷ total words × 1,000). This standardization enabled meaningful cross-group comparison by controlling for the varying interview durations (Zörgő and Peters, 2023).

Prior to examining participatory design-gentrification relationships, this research established gentrification levels across four communities as analytical foundations. Following the PACER framework (Hirsch et al., 2021), systematic qualitative analysis examined gentrification processes through four dimensions: perception, built environment, social environment, and affordability. Because the two host cities differ in baseline living costs, the consumption landscape analysis focused on distributional patterns rather than absolute price levels, employing within-city paired comparisons (Xinhua–Dongming in Shanghai; Yulin–Luhu in Chengdu). Price distributions and cuisine-category compositions were mapped for each community to characterize how consumption environments differ across sites with contrasting participatory trajectories.

3.4 Validity and reliability

The study employed several triangulation strategies to enhance the validity and reliability of findings. Data triangulation integrated resident interviews, expert interviews, and consumption landscape data to provide convergent evidence of neighborhood change patterns. This multi-perspective dataset ensured that interpretations did not rely on a single type of source. Methodological triangulation further strengthened the analysis by combining qualitative coding, co-occurrence network mapping, discursive frequency analysis, and consumption landscape indicators. These complementary methods helped reveal both the experiential and structural components of participatory gentrification. To further strengthen the analysis, a detailed codebook was developed (Table 3). The nine mechanisms were not imposed a priori but emerged inductively from interview data. The coding process was analytically organized by Udoewa's three-stage model of participatory processes, which directed attention to the initiation, participation, and leadership phases as distinct sites where filtering might occur. Within this structure, mechanisms that appeared across multiple cases and were independently referenced by both resident and institutional informants were retained as analytical categories, while idiosyncratic or single-source codes were consolidated into broader groupings (see Supplementary Table S2 in the Supplementary material for representative coding chains from raw data to analytical mechanisms). Initial open coding generated a large descriptive code pool (>200), which was progressively consolidated into thematic clusters within each participatory stage during axial coding. Ambiguities in category boundaries, particularly between cultural barriers and cognitive authority where epistemic and cultural dimensions can overlap, were resolved through iterative memo-writing and cross-case comparison, ensuring consistent application of codes across the dataset. No additional mechanism categories emerged during the final rounds of axial coding, and the nine retained categories provided coverage of the filtering dynamics observed across all four sites while remaining analytically distinct. While the mechanisms were data-driven, their conceptual labeling was refined through dialogue with established scholarship in participation and gentrification research. Analytical decisions, including interpretation of mechanisms and resolution of borderline cases, were documented to improve transparency. Reflexivity was maintained throughout the research process, with particular attention paid to how the researchers' institutional affiliation could influence access, participants' responses, or interpretation of skepticism toward participatory practices. By acknowledging these positional factors and actively seeking disconfirming evidence, the study strengthens its analytical grounding at the intersection of PD and gentrification.

Table 3. Definitions and examples for each code.

4 Results

4.1 Gentrification assessment results

The four communities display clearly differentiated gentrification trajectories. Rather than following a uniform pattern, neighborhood change manifests through distinct combinations of perceived displacement, social restructuring, built-environment transformation, and affordability pressure. These variations establish the contextual conditions within which PD operates and shape the mechanisms through which participation interacts with neighborhood transformation.

Gentrification perception varied considerably across communities despite comparable material transformations. The Yulin case presented a distinct contrast: residents exhibited the strongest perception of gentrification despite objective indicators showing the lowest price levels. Long-term residents explicitly expressed dissatisfaction with excessive tourist flows, interpreting the functional shift as undermining daily life. Several informants framed this not as displacement in the conventional sense but as a loss of spatial belonging: the neighborhood remained physically accessible but had become socially unrecognizable. This dissatisfaction fueled widespread skepticism toward participation initiatives, which were perceived as ineffective in alleviating displacement. Conversely, in Dongming, residents demonstrated weak gentrification perception, framing spatial changes as government-directed improvements rather than market-driven displacement. This limited perception corresponded with a passive participation consciousness, where residents positioned themselves as recipients of renewal rather than active agents.

Rapid transformations in the built environment complicated the relationship between PD and democratic expression. When spaces carrying daily life and neighborhood interactions disappeared or transformed, residents experienced direct gentrification perception. In Yulin, the rapid erasure of traditional businesses became the definitive marker of change, fueling skepticism regarding the representativeness of participatory initiatives. Informants described a commercial landscape that had shifted within a few years from neighborhood-oriented services such as tea houses, mahjong parlors, and small repair shops toward lifestyle-oriented establishments catering predominantly to visitors and young newcomers, with commercial rents on some streets reportedly rising several-fold. Elderly residents reported a contraction of the daily spaces in which they had conducted routine social life, noting that affordable gathering places had become confined to the wet market and a few remaining back-lane tea houses. In Xinhua, spatial change manifested through the functional conversion of heritage buildings for creative industries, generating subtle alienation among original residents rather than physical displacement. The coexistence of high-end dining and design studios alongside traditional noodle shops and public housing created a bifurcated spatial environment in which long-term residents and newer arrivals occupied the same streets but inhabited largely separate commercial and social worlds.

Social environment changes created bifurcated community structures, where participatory processes actively reshaped demographic composition and determined dominant voices. In Xinhua, participation was dominated by cultural professionals, while grassroots residents were marginalized due to their lack of epistemic authority to engage in specialized design discourse. A distinct demographic split characterized Yulin, where participation outcomes aligned with the interests of new migrants and commercial entrants. Long-term residents explicitly opposed this orientation, reporting that initiatives served youth culture and tourism rather than their daily needs. In contrast to these fractured contexts, the Luhu case achieved rapid consensus due to its high population homogeneity. As Table 2 indicates, non-local ratios remain broadly comparable across the four sites (55–61%), suggesting that the character rather than the volume of demographic change distinguishes these communities.

Affordability dynamics proved more complex than absolute price levels would suggest. In Dongming, residents reported no significant affordability pressure; improvements were interpreted as state-led enhancements, and the commercial composition remained oriented toward long-term residents, with regional home-style restaurants, repair shops, and daily-needs services predominating (Table 4). In Luhu, residents—having voluntarily moved into a high-income enclave—reported neither affordability pressures nor symbolic displacement; commercial tenancies within the development are curated by the foundation, producing a consumption environment that is aesthetically uniform but internally consistent with residents' socioeconomic profile. In Xinhua and Yulin, however, affordability intersected with social heterogeneity in distinct ways. Xinhua interviewees frequently described parallel but largely separate consumption worlds occupied by long-term residents and newer, more affluent arrivals. The consumption landscape data corroborate this account: Xinhua displays the widest price dispersion among all four communities, with nearly a quarter of establishments priced below ¥50 coexisting alongside the highest premium share (Table 4; Figure 3). The cuisine composition reinforces this picture: international and fusion dining accounts for a substantial share, while traditional noodle shops and street-food vendors persist alongside them. Dongming, by contrast, presents a consumption landscape dominated by regional home-style cuisine, with minimal international or specialty dining presence—consistent with a community where daily commercial life remains oriented toward long-term, locally rooted residents.

Table 4. Consumption landscape indicators.

Surveyed from Dianping; initial N, 478, after excluding chains/beverages/bakeries: N, 411.

Cuisine categories consolidated from Dianping labels into seven groups (see Figure 3D).

Shapiro–Wilk all p < 0.001; Fligner–Killeen: Shanghai pair p < 0.001, Chengdu pair p = 0.002.

In Yulin, the most striking distributional feature is not price level but price compression: the community records the narrowest dispersion of any site. Interviewees attributed this to a wave of lifestyle-oriented commercial renewal that replaced older establishments with aesthetically updated but similarly priced venues, a pattern of taste-led turnover rather than affordability-driven exclusion. Luhu's consumption environment reflects the planned nature of the development itself. Interview participants noted that commercial tenancies are curated by the developer-led foundation. The pricing data show moderate dispersion, while the cuisine composition shows a higher share of boutique and creative dining formats relative to the other three communities—consistent with a commercially programmed rather than organically evolved landscape.

Across all four sites, the consumption landscape data do not establish causal claims about gentrification. Rather, they provide an observable market-level context against which the participatory dynamics described by residents can be situated: the polarized consumption environment in Xinhua maps onto accounts of cultural-capital filtering; the compressed landscape in Yulin corresponds to descriptions of homogenization without displacement; the stable profile in Dongming aligns with narratives of institutional continuity; and the curated environment in Luhu reflects the developer-mediated participation model identified through interviews.

These differentiated gentrification contexts created distinct structural conditions for PD. Where affordability crises were severe, participation had to navigate rapidly shifting constituencies. Where cultural capital was heterogeneous, participation became a site of contestation over knowledge validity. Where stability prevailed, participation risked becoming merely administrative. These variations shaped how PD operated within different gentrification contexts, as examined in the following section.

4.2 Participatory design in gentrification processes

4.2.1 Frequency analysis

Frequency analysis (see Table 5) of coded mechanisms demonstrates that gentrification-related exclusionary dynamics emerge not through isolated actions but through systematic combinations of participatory mechanisms. Participation control, assessment filtering, and funding selection appear as the most frequently referenced mechanisms across cases, while cognitive authority presents consistent salience regardless of governance configuration. Cultural barriers show the greatest variability among initiation-phase mechanisms, particularly between Xinhua and Dongming, reflecting divergent participatory environments.

Table 5. Mechanism distribution across communities.

The co-occurrence analysis further highlights the relational nature of PD mechanisms (Figure 4). When disaggregated by community, the four heatmaps reveal distinct clustering patterns. In Xinhua, the densest co-occurrence concentrates around cognitive authority, which clusters most tightly with cultural barriers and participation control, indicating a filtering configuration anchored in epistemic hierarchy. In Dongming, resource barriers and cognitive authority form the strongest pairing, while leadership-stage mechanisms show moderate but diffuse co-occurrence. Luhu displays two focal clusters, one linking participation control with cognitive authority, the other coupling assessment filtering with technical filtering, consistent with a dual screening logic of professional endorsement and operational feasibility. Yulin exhibits the most evenly distributed pattern across leadership-stage mechanisms, reflecting the pervasive projectization pressure described by informants.

What becomes evident from these patterns is that exclusion in PD arises not from the strength of individual mechanisms but from their configurational interactions. For example, Xinhua shows moderate levels of participation control but high levels of cognitive authority and cultural screening, producing a composite mechanism of epistemic filtering. Dongming, by contrast, demonstrates low cultural barriers but strong funding selection, reflecting a governance environment in which administrative priorities substitute for cultural gatekeeping. Such comparative differences suggest that participatory filtering is contextually adaptive, aligning with existing power structures, governance mandates, and market demands.

These frequency distributions reveal two additional insights: first, that mechanisms such as assessment filtering and cognitive authority are structurally embedded in PD practices regardless of governance mode; and second, that procedural barriers—despite their low frequency—serve as critical thresholds determining who gains access to subsequent participatory stages. Overall, the frequency analysis suggests that PD operates not as a neutral platform but as a dynamic filtering system responsive to institutional and market imperatives.

4.2.2 Qualitative analysis

Qualitative inquiry offers a granular account of how participatory mechanisms materialize in practice and cumulatively reconfigure neighborhood change. Across the cases, the initiation interface itself engendered significant exclusionary effects. Cultural barriers manifested when proceedings implicitly favored residents possessing higher design literacy, exemplified in Xinhua's selective mobilization of creative and passionate professionals. Concurrently, resource barriers emerged as time-intensive activities disproportionately sidelined residents bound by inflexible labor schedules, effectively stratifying the active participant pool. Procedural barriers further circumscribed involvement, particularly for marginalized groups like tenants, who frequently found themselves omitted from information channels.

Specifically, the initiation phase presented three interrelated barriers that filtered participant composition, creating a structural misalignment between nominal participants and actual beneficiaries. Despite organizers' stated goal of broad inclusion, the process imposed heavy demands on time, resources, and cultural capital. In Xinhua, recruitment explicitly targeted passionate professionals (XH-E15). This approach acted as a filter, excluding residents who lacked design literacy. In Yulin, participatory activities organized through third-party cultural organizations and digital platforms, including creative markets, craft workshops, and neighborhood walking tours, drew predominantly young newcomers and visitors, while the neighborhood's established elderly residents remained largely outside these channels. Resource barriers were equally restrictive. Across all cases, activities required continuous blocks of three to five hours. For those with inflexible working hours, this requirement functioned as a substantial obstacle to sustained engagement. Procedural barriers served as administrative gates. In Yulin, tenants reported being systematically left out of notification channels simply because they were not property owners (YL-R30). Consequently, this cumulative filtering ensured that participation occurred among a curated, compliant constituency.

During the participation phase, value judgments were transformed into technical decisions through professional authority. Here, cultural barriers and cognitive authority worked together as a reinforcing loop. Cultural filtering acted as a pre-screen: it selected participants who already recognized professional authority. These participants then legitimized process designs that further consolidated professional knowledge thresholds. In Xinhua, design value was explicitly attributed to professional credentials rather than community needs (XH-E37); organizers privileged high-profile designers to confer expert authority and symbolic legitimacy. This established a rigid epistemic hierarchy, providing the rationale for stringent assessment filtering. Nowhere was this more evident than in Luhu, where foundation staff elevated operational sustainability to the status of a non-negotiable imperative. The project lead articulated this technocratic priority explicitly:

“research needs to identify real problems…public space production needs to reverse engineer design from an operational perspective, focusing on…operational costs.” (LH-E141).

This requirement functioned as a structural screen, subjecting community proposals to operational viability assessments before participatory deliberation could shape them. Residents corroborated this narrowing from the other side. In Yulin, a long-term resident noted that while consultation did occur during the government-led renovation, its scope remained tightly circumscribed:

“they did communicate with me, but the range was very limited…many residents found it hard to participate in renovation decisions—for example, what kind of trees to plant, or the color of facade tiles.” (YL-R87).

Across the cases, the needs that gained traction within the participatory process, including creative spaces, aesthetic improvements, and operational efficiency, consistently reflected the preferences of the filtered participant base rather than the broader resident population.

Finally, the implementation phase subjected proposals to a final layer of market and administrative filtering. Proposals passed through multiple institutional gatekeepers, channeling outcomes toward performance metrics. In Yulin, participation was projectized, reduced to annual funding deliverables requiring evaluation reports (YL-R13). This shift transformed participation into a performance indicator rather than a tool for sustained empowerment. Concurrently, administrative filtering screened proposals against strict regulatory requirements. Moreover, given that NGO-led projects relied on government funding, funding selection in Luhu enforced a self-sufficiency logic, organizing projects based on investment returns (LH-O121). Collectively, these mechanisms guided implementation toward market-oriented interventions, ensuring outcomes remained within administratively sanctioned bounds. Ongoing informal practices that constituted much of the everyday social fabric—daily gatherings, self-organized routines, neighborhood mutual aid—fell outside the project-based format and therefore outside funded participatory infrastructure.

4.3 Cross-mechanism analysis

Cross-case comparison reveals that participatory mechanisms do not operate in isolation; rather, they combine into distinct configurations whose filtering directions align with the specific forms of neighborhood change observed in each community. In Xinhua, cultural barriers and cognitive authority form the densest mechanism cluster (Figure 4), and cultural barriers reach their highest frequency across the four sites. This configuration produces a form of cultural-capital-driven gentrification: recruitment channels select for professional design literacy, cognitive authority consolidates aesthetic and creative-class epistemologies as evaluation criteria, and the resulting spatial outputs—curated public spaces, heritage conversions, and professionally crafted community narratives—align with the neighborhood's ongoing revaluation. The polarized consumption landscape at this site, where a substantial premium segment coexists with persistent budget establishments, corroborates residents' accounts of two parallel but largely separate community worlds.

In Yulin, participation control, funding selection, and administrative filtering distribute evenly across the leadership stage, reflecting pervasive projectization pressure. Rapid market revalorization intersects with this filtering configuration to produce an accelerated market-led gentrification pathway: participatory control absorbs the preferences of incoming, lifestyle-oriented demographics, while evaluation filtering channels proposals toward commercially viable formats. The commercial homogenization described by long-term residents—traditional services replaced by standardized lifestyle venues—is not counteracted by the participatory process but procedurally consolidated through it. Yet residents report the strongest gentrification perception among all four communities despite the lowest absolute price levels, indicating that displacement here operates through cultural and functional channels rather than price. In Dongming, administrative filtering and funding selection overshadow cultural or cognitive thresholds, producing a state-stabilized selective inclusion pattern in which PD reinforces governmental priorities while maintaining an appearance of community empowerment. The relatively stable consumption landscape reflects the weaker market pressures facing this community. Filtering here does not accelerate gentrification but channels participation toward policy-compliant outcomes that leave existing power arrangements undisturbed. In Luhu, the developer-led foundation's emphasis on operational sustainability pre-screens proposals for market compatibility, creating a professionalized consensus environment that aligns with the community's socioeconomic homogeneity. Filtering operates not through cultural or administrative gatekeeping but through technical and assessment criteria organized around the foundation's planning and financial framework, producing outcomes that are aesthetically coherent and operationally legible but bypass the redistributive ambitions associated with PD in other contexts. Figure 5 illustrates how these configurations operate through three interconnected filtering pathways to progressively redraw the boundaries of legitimate participation.

First, consensus-manufacturing is built on the intersection of cultural thresholds and professional authority. In Xinhua and Luhu, where professional organizations play a core facilitating role, recruitment and process design tend to privilege participants who endorse professional epistemologies. The participatory process does not explicitly suppress alternative voices but marginalizes them by establishing professional thresholds, including design literacy, operational viability, and aesthetic coherence, as implicit evaluation criteria. In Xinhua, this yields spatial outcomes aligned with the imagination of the creative class; in Luhu, it reinforces the developer's planning vision.

Second, systematic knowledge governance operates through the close integration of evaluation filtering and professional authority. As the community-level heatmaps confirm, this pairing registers consistently high co-occurrence across otherwise diverse governance arrangements, indicating that technical review processes translate complex community demands into professional problems regardless of whether filtering is culturally or administratively driven. Professional dominance frequently persists despite deliberate efforts to balance power, indicating that these asymmetries are structural rather than procedural. In the cases studied here, this dynamic approximates what Barnes et al. (2006) call “governance through participation,” validating market-compatible outcomes under the guise of technical feasibility.

Third, administrative standardization operates through funding selection and administrative filtering. In the context of Chinese governance, the projectization of PD (Zhao et al., 2023; Zhou, 2014) transforms participation into a policy performance metric, making sustained practice dependent on demonstrable deliverables within funding cycles. In Yulin, this logic aligns participatory outputs with the commercial revaluation already reshaping the community; in Dongming, it directs outcomes toward policy-compliant improvements rather than resident-driven priorities.

Table 6 juxtaposes the participatory configurations and observed neighborhood changes across the four cases, synthesizing the actor practices, procedural arrangements, and spatial outcomes described but not compared in Sections 4.1 and 4.2. Figure 5 identifies cross-cutting filtering pathways that recur across communities; Table 6 presents the case-level configurations from which those pathways emerge.

Table 6. Cross-case comparison of participatory configurations and neighborhood changes.

These configurations highlight a broader pattern: across all four cases, the procedural mechanisms embedded in PD, from recruitment and knowledge validation to evaluation screening and administrative standardization, operate as routine features of participatory practice rather than as anomalies or failures. Their cumulative effect is to translate heterogeneous community needs into institutionally and commercially legible formats, progressively narrowing the range of spatial outcomes that can emerge from the participatory process. This narrowing does not require any actor to consciously practice exclusion; it follows from a structural alignment between the operational logic of PD and the governance and market logics shaping neighborhood change. The resulting spatial outcomes acquire a procedural legitimacy that purely market-driven changes lack, a dynamic this study terms participatory gentrification.

5 Discussion

The findings reveal a fundamental contradiction at the heart of participatory design (PD): although PD aspires to democratize urban regeneration through co-creation and empowerment, its institutionalized forms often reproduce—and in some cases amplify—the very inequalities it seeks to address. This tension is not merely incidental or context-specific; rather, it reflects structural dynamics through which participatory procedures become entangled with gentrification processes. Synthesizing these results, this study conceptualizes participatory gentrification as a distinctive dynamic in which seemingly democratic participation legitimizes and facilitates neighborhood transformation aligned with market, cultural, or administrative imperatives.

Three analytical insights emerge from this variation. First, participatory gentrification is best understood as a non-linear, cumulative process. Mechanisms do not operate independently; instead, they reinforce one another to progressively align participatory outcomes with dominant governance or market logics. Second, PD does not intervene in neighborhood change from outside; rather, it becomes structurally incorporated into the governance of urban transformation, translating socio-political conflicts into technical or design questions. This depoliticizes contestation by reframing divergent community interests as matters of feasibility, professional quality, or administrative compliance. Moreover, when the resulting spatial outcomes pass through participatory procedures, they acquire the weight of collective deliberation—making them more difficult for affected residents to contest, not because opposition is suppressed, but because the object of opposition shifts from an identifiable exercise of power to what appears as a collectively reached decision. Third, participatory gentrification is not the result of insincere actors or flawed methods alone. Even well-intentioned and carefully designed participatory processes may produce exclusionary effects when embedded in institutional contexts that prioritize performance indicators, operational sustainability, or place branding. The direction of filtering, however, is not intrinsic to the participatory process itself but shaped by the governance and market conditions within which it is embedded. The relationship between participatory filtering and neighborhood change is not unidirectional: governance and market conditions shape which filtering configurations become dominant, while the spatial outcomes generated through those configurations become part of the structural landscape within which subsequent participation operates. In this sense, participatory processes and neighborhood change are not analytically separable but mutually embedded.

The four cases further demonstrate that participatory gentrification, while consistently operating through the cumulative procedural and epistemic filtering identified earlier, takes recognizably different forms across distinct governance and market contexts (Table 6). These cases also indicate that participatory gentrification encompasses not only accelerated displacement processes but also non-displacement forms of exclusion, where participation occurs within communities facing limited market pressures yet still produces procedurally legitimated outcomes that constrain substantive empowerment. In Dongming, participation proceeds without displacement or affordability pressure, yet still channels residents' substantive priorities toward policy-compliant outcomes rather than resident-driven ones. What distinguishes the phenomenon is therefore the procedural legitimation of exclusion, of which displacement is one possible form. Even where displacement is absent, residents' claims over the neighborhood's trajectory and revaluation, the dimension along which gentrification reorders a neighborhood, remain foreclosed. These differences are not variations within a single uniform phenomenon but configurations through which the same underlying mechanism—participation generating procedural legitimacy for exclusionary or restrictive neighborhood change—articulates with the specific institutional and market forces shaping each context. The differentiated pathways thus offer a heuristic comparison: they illustrate how participatory gentrification operates as a context-sensitive phenomenon, with each case suggesting distinct points of intervention for participatory practice and urban policy.

The empirical findings further suggest a recurring logic underlying these contextual differences. Each governance and market environment places different facilitating actors at the center of PD, and these actors' institutional positions shape which evaluative standards become operative within the process. In Xinhua, professional NGOs depend on design recognition for continued legitimacy, and this dependence elevates aesthetic and professional standards, activating cultural barriers and cognitive authority. In Yulin, third-party organizations operating under project-based funding must produce reportable annual outcomes, embedding funding selection and participation control as the operative mechanisms. In Dongming, neighborhood committees and subdistrict offices simultaneously allocate funds and answer to performance evaluation, making administrative filtering and funding selection structurally inseparable. In Luhu, foundation staff answer to corporate parents for operational sustainability, and technical and assessment filtering follow directly from this accountability. This pathway indicates how the institutional logic within which each facilitating actor operates actively shapes the filtering configuration, rather than context and mechanism merely co-occurring—a relationship observed across the four cases.

Despite these differences across cases, the four pathways share several features that emerge from the preceding analysis. In each case, filtering works through routine procedures rather than explicit exclusion, narrowing the range of possible outcomes across stages without provoking sustained contestation. The exclusionary effects arise from how participatory practice interacts with surrounding governance and market forces, not from the intentions of particular actors. The legitimacy that secures these outcomes is produced within the participatory process itself, which means that contestation must engage both the outcomes and the procedures that generated them. Together with the cross-case differences, these shared features describe participatory gentrification as a consistent process whose specific configurations depend on the institutional and market arrangements within which participation is embedded. Identifying participatory gentrification across settings accordingly requires attending to its common procedural logic, while interpreting any specific case requires understanding how that logic interacts with the forces shaping that neighborhood.

These dynamics resonate with, but are not reducible to, existing critiques of participatory governance. While previous accounts have highlighted how exclusion occurs through elite co-optation of institutional access (Lauermann and Mallak, 2023), governmental control over participatory agendas (Zhao et al., 2023), or the broader absorption of contestation within post-political frameworks (Swyngedouw, 2018), the concept of participatory gentrification captures a different phenomenon. It traces how exclusionary outcomes are generated through the seemingly neutral, micro-level mechanics of PD itself. Rather than operating through overt manipulation or suppression, exclusion here emerges from the routine procedures that validate certain knowledge forms and spatial visions while filtering out others. In this sense, participatory gentrification does not displace existing gentrification analyses focused on land markets, capital flows, or policy regimes, but identifies an independent mechanism that acts not on the material drivers of neighborhood change but on its legitimacy and contestability, complementing rather than substituting for structural accounts of capital and policy.

By specifying these concrete procedural mechanisms, this study makes two theoretical contributions. Within participatory design scholarship, it challenges the assumption that higher-quality processes inherently produce equitable outcomes. Process quality and outcome equity operate along distinct causal pathways: PD may succeed procedurally while simultaneously contributing to exclusion. This finding extends design justice critiques (Costanza-Chock, 2020) and recent debates on PD's depoliticization (Akama et al., 2024). For gentrification research, the study highlights a previously overlooked mechanism of neighborhood change. Where displacement is typically understood through housing markets or redevelopment agendas, this study shows that participatory governance itself can serve as a procedural channel through which neighborhood transformation is stabilized under the appearance of collaborative decision-making, thereby expanding the explanatory scope of gentrification theory.

At the institutional level, the study underscores the structural constraints within which PD operates. When participatory initiatives are projectized, bound to short-term funding cycles, or evaluated through output-driven metrics, they risk prioritizing deliverables over redistribution of influence. When expertise is privileged over lived experience, PD becomes vulnerable to epistemic injustice. When administrative approval determines which proposals survive, community visions are selectively translated into forms compatible with state or market agendas. The consumption landscape data presented in Section 4.1 are consistent with this selective translation: the distributional patterns of commercial activity in each community correspond to the filtering configurations identified through interview analysis, suggesting that the procedural dynamics documented here leave observable traces in neighborhood-level market structures. The Chinese governance context renders these dynamics particularly visible, but the mechanisms identified share structural features with project-based governance arrangements documented in other settings, though their specific configurations require further comparative investigation. Across all four cases, marginalized residents were formally included yet rendered structurally irrelevant to spatial outcomes—a gap between procedural presence and substantive influence that the concept of participatory gentrification is designed to capture. Structural irrelevance operates not only at the scale of a city's standing within global urban hierarchies but also, in the present cases, at the intra-urban scale, where residents are rendered irrelevant to their own neighborhood's trajectory through the routine procedures of participation itself.

The preceding analysis carries implications for participatory practice. The finding that the most consequential filtering occurs not at the point of entry but during knowledge validation and evaluative screening indicates that broadening recruitment, while necessary, does not address the stages where exclusion is most structurally embedded. Making evaluation criteria explicit and subject to participatory scrutiny is a precondition for addressing the filtering documented here, ensuring that the standards governing which knowledge counts and which proposals advance are themselves open to contestation. Systematic tracking of how participant composition relates to the demographic profile of the broader community would further render filtering visible and available for corrective action. More concretely, three practical implications follow: first, establishing feedback mechanisms for proposal screening that make filtering criteria and rationale explicit and accessible to participants; second, incorporating residents' needs satisfaction as an evaluative dimension alongside procedural outputs and operational viability; third, employing multi-dimensional evaluation at pre-screening stages prior to formal participation, rather than allowing any single criterion such as operational sustainability, administrative compliance, or professional design standards to determine which proposals advance. These measures address specific mechanisms identified in this study, but the findings also indicate that in all four cases, institutional incentive structures shaped by project-based funding and performance evaluation oriented outcomes toward market-compatible proposals, suggesting that process-level adjustments alone may not be sufficient without corresponding changes in the institutional frameworks within which PD is embedded.

These findings argue for a shift in participatory governance scholarship: from assessing participation based on procedural quality to examining the conditions under which participation enables meaningful redistribution vs. those under which it becomes implicated in exclusionary spatial restructuring. Understanding PD as a mechanism of neighborhood change—rather than solely as a normative ideal—allows scholars and practitioners to more accurately diagnose its potentials and limitations.

6 Conclusion

This study introduces the concept of participatory gentrification to explain how participatory design (PD), even when procedurally inclusive, can reproduce or legitimize exclusionary neighborhood change. By integrating the PACER framework with Udoewa's three-stage model, the analysis demonstrates that participatory processes operate through cumulative procedural and epistemic filters—including cultural barriers, cognitive authority, assessment filtering, and administrative screening—that progressively narrow whose voices count and which design outcomes become possible. Across four communities in Shanghai and Chengdu, these mechanisms align participation with prevailing governance and market structures, shaping differentiated gentrification trajectories.

The findings challenge a core assumption in participatory governance scholarship: that improving procedural quality necessarily leads to more equitable urban outcomes. Instead, the study shows that participation and gentrification are co-constitutive processes. Participatory practices do not merely reflect neighborhood change but actively participate in its production by translating diverse and contested community claims into institutionally acceptable forms. In doing so, participation may generate procedural legitimacy for symbolic, cultural, or material displacement, even in the absence of direct physical relocation.

The study makes three contributions. Conceptually, it reframes participation as a potential mechanism of gentrification rather than a guaranteed corrective to it. Analytically, it advances a mechanism-based framework that links participatory stages to differentiated neighborhood change contexts, moving beyond static evaluations of participatory quality. Empirically, it provides comparative evidence from Chinese urban regeneration cases, illustrating how participatory mechanisms adapt to governance-led, market-driven, and culturally driven redevelopment regimes.

Several limitations warrant acknowledgment. The analysis focuses on Chinese governance settings, where participatory design is strongly shaped by project-based funding and administrative oversight. While this context renders participatory gentrification particularly visible, future research should examine whether similar mechanisms operate in other institutional environments. In addition, the study relies primarily on retrospective interview accounts; longitudinal research tracking how filtering configurations shift as governance arrangements and market conditions change would test the stability of the patterns identified here, while action-based research exploring whether making evaluation criteria explicit and contestable within participatory processes alters filtering outcomes would connect the analytical framework to design practice. Moreover, the consumption landscape data represent a single cross-sectional snapshot and cannot capture temporal dynamics of commercial turnover; longitudinal tracking of establishment entry and exit would strengthen future analyses of how participatory processes interact with evolving market conditions. Additionally, coding was conducted by a single researcher; while iterative memo-writing, cross-case comparison, and systematic codebook development were employed to maintain analytical rigor, future studies should incorporate inter-coder reliability procedures. Finally, this study examines the procedural contribution of PD to neighborhood change processes shaped by multiple interacting forces; it does not claim that participatory mechanisms constitute the primary driver of gentrification, which remains rooted in land markets, policy regimes, and capital flows.

Recognizing participatory design as both a democratic opportunity and a potential driver of inequality is essential for more reflexive urban regeneration practices. Rather than asking whether participation is inclusive in form, future participatory frameworks must attend to how participation redistributes power in practice and how it shapes spatial outcomes. Only by confronting these tensions can participatory governance move toward more just and genuinely inclusive forms of urban transformation.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2026.1786743/full#supplementary-material

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Footnotes

Edited by: Anil Kumar Roy, CEPT University, India

Reviewed by: Xiang Li, Xiamen University, China

Rui Wang, Wuhan University of Technology, China

Footnotes

PD, Participatory design; PACER, Perceptions about changes in environments and residents; NGO, Non-Governmental Organization; POI, Point of interest; GIS, Geographic information system; IQR, Interquartile range.