Departing from the idea that cultural mechanisms are capable of allowing for conceptual dichotomies to create injustice, participation comes across as a valuable asset to obtain a more just society. Participation brings forth first-hand stories of people’s everyday lives that can assist us more than any other form of representation in understanding spatialities from within, including their changeability over time and role as exclusionary devices. Of these conceptual dichotomies ‘rural-urban’ is the oldest but also the most pervasive one. While local participation is considered a key tenet of so-called rural and urban development projects, the latter face difficulties relating to people’s needs and ultimately fail to engage them. In efforts to increase participation, one (if not the main) aspect is often overlooked – namely the question of who has the right to define ‘rurality/urbanity’ in the first place. For instance, if policymakers or geographers look for ‘everyday problems’ in ‘rural areas’, they will find ‘rural problems’ (cf. Law, 2004). This, in turn, impacts the value of participation, because whenever there is a crevice between identity and problem formulation, it gives rise to exclusion from setting the agenda. Using a novel STS-approach, in this paper we outline some principal socio-material and cognitive drivers that not only construct, but also dictate ‘ruralities/urbanities’, which then are transposed onto the ‘world out there’ to be lived, performed and embodied. To avert such paradoxes of ‘projected participation’ our aim is to problematize this tacit top-down approach as counterproductive in the process of letting people define their problems.