Expanding Participation in Urban Planning Through -Costume- Scenographics: Pukkelpop Festival and the North-South Road in Limburg Belgium

Abstract

This doctoral research explores the intersection between the N74 Limburg North–South connection and the Pukkelpop festival, aiming to reimagine sustainable urban transitions. Each August, Pukkelpop occupies a section of the N74, transforming the road into a temporary stage of encounters. Through this lens, the research explores how scenographics -understood as practices of stage crafting and showing dressing- can alter the sense of place as well as bodies themselves. Drawing from expanded scenography, performance studies, and Critical Costume, it examines how acts of staging and costuming mediate relations between human and more-than-human actors, producing temporary forms of coexistence. Introducing the twin concepts of institutioning and commoning, the study analyses how Pukkelpop operates between grassroots initiatives and formal governance. The festival's recurring scenography is read as a cyclic space where temporary regulations and socialities emerge across multiple scales, public, private, and personal, and leave long-lasting traces in local communities. Focusing on costume scenographics, the paper reimagines the intermediary role of the participatory designer as a dresser, one who mediates transformation through acts of costuming. It explores how dressing, as an embodied and relational act of appearing otherwise, can become a method for coexistence. Translating this metaphor into a methodological framework, the study examines how clothing encodes hierarchies and how dressing can destabilise social positioning within participatory spaces. Reading PD workshops as theatrical environments foregrounds the performative and political dimensions of appearance while extending the inquiry toward posthumanist perspectives, where costume operates as an agential, sensing medium enabling more-than-human participation. Through a critical review of the PD literature, the research identifies three constellations of existing “dresser-like” practices: wearables for empathy, props for enactment, and fabric-based community work. Based on these, it develops a repertoire of dresser practices across three scales: costume hacking, costume-led mapping, and public costume interventions. By positioning the designer as a dresser, this research suggests that costuming practices can serve as a means to rebalance power through embodied attunement, connect human and more-than-human relations, and reconfigure public appearance as a form of critique.