Relational Infrastructuring for Transformative Resilience: Participatory Design and Designing with Country in Architectural Practice

Architectural responses to sustainability and resilience remain strongly shaped by technocratic frameworks that privilege quantification, optimisation, and finite project delivery, often marginalising the relational and place-based dimensions through which social, ecological, and cultural continuity is sustained. This conceptual study asks how participatory design can enable, enact, and envision Designing with Country as an approach to transformative resilience in architectural practice. Through critical synthesis and comparative interpretation of scholarship across participatory design, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, resilience thinking, and more-than-human design, the study applies relational infrastructuring as an analytical lens. The analysis is organised through three interconnected acts of enabling, enacting, and envisioning, supported by illustrative examples from documented architectural and design practice. Reading across these acts identifies four interdependent domains of relational infrastructuring: (i) relational ontologies; (ii) infrastructuring processes; (iii) infrastructural conditions; and (iv) relational outcomes. These four domains reorient architectural attention from discrete objects and performance metrics towards the relationships, responsibilities, processes, and institutional conditions through which built environments are constituted and sustained. Relational infrastructuring is proposed as an intentionally non-prescriptive conceptual framework through which architectural practice may cultivate transformative resilience as a relational capacity grounded in care, reciprocity, continuity, and responsibility.