🏛️ New Book Chapter: Spaces for Deliberation
🏛️ New Book Chapter: Spaces for Deliberation
Why are columns, white marble, and golden frescoes the “preferred and default style” for so many public buildings around the world?
The following is an excerpt of a chapter contributed by
, Amelie Klein, and Vera Sacchetti to the new book Agonistic Assemblies, edited by Markus Miessen and published by Sternberg Press:The pervasiveness of our current democratic model is visible in the way that power is spatially represented. In 2014, the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale investigated the architecture of parliaments as places of power. The exhibition analysed 196 national parliaments all over the world, most of which— regardless of their age, location, or the regime they represent—flaunt a neoclassical style. “The survey shows how consistently the shell of almost every parliament in the world retells this story—a story which is Eurocentric in its content,” writes curator Christian Kühn:
“The predominance of neoclassicism to this day is all the more surprising given that only just over 30 of the 196 national assemblies we studied gather in buildings erected before 1914. Another 20 date from the years 1915 to 1949, and the remaining 143 from the period thereafter.”
What is even more astonishing about this “monumental neoclassical choir of world parliaments,” Kühn continues, is the fact that the majority don’t even come close to actually living what can be described as a democracy from a Western perspective. “The fact that [the shell of] North Korea’s parliament seems like a copy of its Finnish counterpart is surprising. How much hierarchy, how much authoritarian structure,” Kühn asks, “is inherently built into the parliament of an almost flawless democracy so that one of the most authoritarian states in the world could use it as a model for its own house of the people?”
Let us take a look inside. Parliament, a 2016 book and website compiled by the Dutch architecture practice XML, investigates the general assembly halls of the parliaments of all 193 UN member states. Finland, which introduced a new constitution in 2000 bestowing considerable power to the parliament, features a semicircle like most European democracies. In contrast, North Korea’s main assembly hall is organized in what the authors call “the classroom”: “Here, members of parliament are seated behind each other in long consecutive rows, directed toward a single speaker who stands in front. The typology is particularly common in non-democratic regimes, China, Cuba, North Korea and Russia’s parliaments are all structured like classrooms ... Ironically, the scale of the assembly hall seems to be inversely proportional to the country’s rank on the Democracy Index. Parliaments in the least democratic countries convene in the largest halls.” Finland’s parliament consists of 200 members. North Korea’s of 687.
But why temples to begin with? Why columns and pediments, white marble, and golden frescoes? Why has this become the “preferred and default style” for so many public buildings all around the world, so much so that the Trump administration even made it a US law, the Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, signed in December 2020? Sure, the style alludes to the architecture of “democratic Athens and republican Rome,” as the Trump order says. The American and French Revolutions with all their social, moral, and political change needed an expression distinctly different from the previously dominant rococo and colonial styles which stood for absolutism and imperial power. But, as mentioned above, Kim Jong-Il had a taste for neo-classical architecture too, and so did other authoritarian leaders, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, who all sought “to connect the grandeur of the Roman empire to their own power.”
Historians assure us that temples were often used beyond their core function. The Roman Senate, for example, convened in temples, among other places. Yet even if we acknowledge this multipurpose functionality, it is not their most genuine intention, and we cannot help but wonder why, of all possible archetypes, the founding fathers of what we consider modern democracy housed their representative assemblies in architecture modeled after something so inherently undemocratic as a temple: built to praise one or a few gods and fully accessible to only a few privileged individuals—the priests who served the deities and acted on behalf of the faithful many. Sacrificial offerings as well as other rituals and cult practices were held at an altar outside of the temple, within a wider precinct. The temple building itself housed cult images, votive offerings, and shrines. Otherwise, with few exceptions, it remained empty and silent.
What a misunderstanding.
Or maybe not. “What we today call democracy,” writes Hannah Arendt in her analysis On Revolution, “is a form of government where the few rule, at least supposedly, in the interest of the many. This government is democratic in that popular welfare and private happiness are its chief goals; but it can be called oligarchic in the sense that public happiness and public freedom have again become the privilege of the few.” This (mis)representation is not the result of an unfortunate development over time, but was consciously built into the system from the beginning. “Contemporary democratic governments have evolved from a political system that was conceived by its founders as opposed to democracy,” says French political scientist Bernard Manin.
[…]
We can choose to build architecture that enhances deliberation and respectful communication rather than manifesting current political power relations and modes of conversation. A toguna, for instance, can be found in any Dogon village in Mali or Burkina Faso, West Africa. Functioning as a place where the male elders of the community gather for debate and some shade, it is a structure open to all four sides with a hefty thatched roof and often delicately carved-stone or wood pillars. In many cases, the ceiling is too low for a person to stand upright, which forces people to stay put, even if discussions about village affairs get heated. Who knows how many times this architectural feature has helped to cool down a hot temper before things got out of hand. It is tempting to take it as a hint for a different culture of communication—and architectural intention—than, say, the benches at the UK’s House of Commons, which face each other, literally, “at sword’s length.”
The toguna is also what inspired Pritzker Prize laureate Francis Kéré’s 2019 “Xylem” pavilion at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana. Being a native of Burkina Faso, Kéré has often publicly regretted the fact that contemporary African archi- tecture so rarely draws from the continent’s own nature and culture, instead copying Western styles. With “Xylem,” he turns the tables and brings a West African archetype to the US. Named after a tree’s main transportation system for water and nutrients, the visitors’ pavilion borrows the togu na’s open structure, cushions, and hefty roof. And it seems to insinuate that appreciative communication— or palaver, as West Africans call it— is just as vital for society as water and nutrients are for trees.
Read the rest on our website or download a PDF of the chapter here.
🏡 Democratising City Planning Open Application: Seeking partners to collaborate with DemocracyNext
We are seeking expressions of interest from cities around the world to work with DemocracyNext to make systemic changes to how decisions about urban planning are made, with deliberative and sortition (lottery)-based approaches such as Citizens’ Assemblies as a key pillar of change. The ultimate goal is to help cities be able to make fair decisions that garner legitimacy about the future of our cities related to urban planning issues such as housing, transportation, mobility, environmental impacts, and others.
Using the proposals outlined in DemocracyNext’s paper Six ways to democratise city planning as a starting point, the goal is to collaborate with 3 cities over the next 2 years to adapt the proposals to each context, designing how Citizens’ Assemblies can be embedded in each unique place to broaden and deepen citizen participation and deliberation in urban planning decision-making.
The deadline to register an expression of interest is March 12.
More details here; click here to go directly to the application form.
🛠️ What we’re up to:
This week, Claudia Chwalisz is speaking at the Yale conference on Governing Citizens’ Assemblies and Governing (with) AI organised by our International Advisory Council member Hélène Landemore
Founding Head of Research and Learning Ieva Česnulaitytė will speak about at G1000’s Spring School in Eupen from March 20-22. More here.
We are excited and honoured to announce that Deborah Botwood Smith is joining our International Advisory Council. Deborah has held board, CEO and leadership roles in global financial companies and has a track record in building value and engagement. She is currently Business Development Director at Invest Europe, the group that represents Europe’s providers of private capital. She has particular expertise in corporate reputation and governance issues, corporate culture, thought leadership and crisis management. More here.
📖 What we’re reading:
🇩🇪 Two German museums collaborated with us to use Citizens' Assemblies to involve the public in their programming: 30 people, selected by lottery, deliberated over 4 days. We hope other cultural institutions will be inspired by this work! Thanks to the Museums Association for this coverage of our effort: read the article here.
🇪🇺 150 people selected by sortition from 27 countries are deliberating on energy efficiency to feed into EU policy-making. They met this past weekend for the first of three weekends of deliberation. Often people ask a very legitimate question - "My community/country is so diverse, could Citizens' Assemblies work in such a context?" The EU-level deliberations are proving this is indeed possible (with an additional complexity of 24 different languages!) and helpful for developing better policies. Bravo to the EU teams leading this change: Dubravka Suica, Gaëtane Ricard-Nihoul, Colin Scicluna! Read more here.