Understanding the role of physical spaces in social de-segregations: Spatial lessons from Kerala and Northern Ireland

Within development literature, recent decades have seen an unequivocal turn towards a call for a decentralised and more contextual and vernacular understanding of social, political and economic development. This paper brings together the development literature on the “participatory turn” with Henri Lefebvre’s work on social spaces and autogestion, to move beyond the “what” and “how” of participation, to add the question of “where” in exploring efforts to overcome social segregation and build sustainable integrated communities. It discusses two very distinct regional cases—Kerala (India) and Northern Ireland—as examples to argue that our analysis of the potential for transformative politics in society needs to include a study of its “participatory spaces”, and that this requirement transcends simple binaries like North/South, institutional/non-institutional, and top-down/bottom-up.