New Cities Programme collaborations in Lithuania and Luxembourg
How the cities of Vilnius and Esch-sur-Alzette plan to democratise their urban planning
As part of DemocracyNext’s Cities Programme, we’ve had a chance over the last month to visit two of the cities we’ll be working with—Vilnius, Lithuania and Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg—for some initial meetings and kick-off events.
We’ll be making an official announcement about the full cohort of cities in September, but for newsletter readers, we wanted to share a sneak peek of where we will be working:
In June, Senior Advisor to DemocracyNext Ieva Česnulaitytė and Cities Programme Lead James Macdonald-Nelson visited Vilnius to kick off a 2 year collaboration with the Vilnius City Municipality to design and deliver Lithuania’s first Citizens’ Assembly. Ieva and James met with key people within the municipality including the city’s Chief Architect, Laura Kairiene, and her team of advisors. Beatričė Umbrasaitė, advisor for citizen participation and communication, organised meetings with key people from different departments across the municipality, as well as local academics and NGOs, in order to begin laying the groundwork for the assembly. These conversations have also helped to begin teasing out the specific challenges the city is facing and how a Citizens’ Assembly might be best positioned to tackle them.
In addition, this month Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext Claudia Chwalisz and James visited Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg’s second largest city. There, they met with Mayor Christian Weis, Secretary General Jean-Paul Espen, Leader of the Opposition Steve Faltz, Markus Miessen, Chair of the City of Esch, his colleague César Reyes Najera at the University of Luxembourg, and many other senior civil servants and local politicians to discuss DemocracyNext’s collaboration with the city.
On 1 July, Claudia and James spoke at a public event with these key figures at the Cultures of Assembly space to present and discuss the Citizens’ Assembly that will take place in Esch-sur-Alzette in 2025. The exact issue is still to be decided, but we are in ongoing conversations with the municipality and local civil society organisations to identify it. The city is committed to this being more than a one-off initiative, and a next phase of this collaboration will be to determine the best way to institutionalise Citizens' Assemblies in Esch-sur-Alzette!
For more, see coverage by the magazine e-Flux and in weekly paper Lëtzebuerger Land.
Designing spaces for deliberation
Linked with our Cities Programme work, DemNext fellow Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen and Cities Programme Lead James Macdonald-Nelson are writing three short papers that will be launched in the Autumn on the topic of spaces for deliberation. The papers are intended to contribute to the conversation around how we can intentionally design spaces for deliberative assemblies. Usually they take place in conference rooms, libraries, universities, and other spaces that are not necessarily designed for these kinds of processes.
What would a space designed explicitly for citizen deliberation look like? How would it reflect principles of equality, mutual respect, diversity? How could we co-create spaces that invite and encourage listening and collaboration?
We recently began exploring these questions in a chapter contributed by Claudia Chwalisz, Amelie Klein, and Vera Sacchetti to Markus Miessen’s book Agonistic Assemblies. In a new feature for Stir World, writer Mrinmayee Bhoot reviews the book:
Miessen notes that, rather than being a historical overview of what assembly practices have been and what they have meant, the book instead provides a toolbox; a consideration of what could be possible in terms of architectural thinking as a method. Miessen elaborates, “As an anthology, this book presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralised spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making…
Of all the texts in this section, one of the most insightful is “A Tree, a Roof, a Tent: Spatial Models for a New Democratic Paradigm” by Claudia Chwalisz, Amelie Klein, and Vera Sacchetti where they suggest that we do not face a crisis of democracy but one of “elected oligarchy.” The text interrogates ‘public’ architectures of existing governance systems and suggests alternatives “that reflect genuinely democratic principles of openness, participation, and deliberation.”
Welcoming Ifeoma Ebo to our Advisory Council!
🏛️ We are delighted to share that Ifeoma Ebo is joining our International Advisory Council! Ebo is a Nigerian-American, Brooklyn based artist, urbanist and transdisciplinary designer with a twenty year track record in transforming urban spaces into platforms for equity and design excellence. She is Principal of Creative Urban Alchemy an award winning studio working at the intersection of art, architecture, urban design and planning centering cultural heritage in praxis.
As Assistant Professor for Design & Sustainability at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York she engages in research and teaches trans disciplinary courses exploring cultural, climate and environmental justice. She has most recently received awards and fellowships from the Black Artists & Designers Guild, New York State Council on the Arts, the Associate for Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the Architectural League, and United States Artists.
Welcome, Ifeoma!
📡 What’s on our radar
🇫🇷 Last week, the Paris City Council — for the first time ever — voted in favour of adopting a Citizen Bill that was drafted by the Members of the Paris Citizens' Assembly. Watch the video above to hear from the members themselves 👆
From September 2023 - April 2024, the Assembly Members worked on legislation to address issues of homelessness in Paris. It was an impressive process: 5 learning sessions, 11 workshops and 3 site visits. The bill has 20 recommendations.
It's also a historic moment: the first time ever that a Citizens' Assembly's recommendations have been written as a bill that has gone directly to a vote by a city council. We want to say congratulations to Anouch Toranian, Anne Hidalgo, Elian Belon, Marion ROTH and colleagues for their work on transforming Parisian democracy.
🇬🇧 Richard Wilson, CEO of the Iswe Foundation, has a strongly-worded piece out in The Guardian urging Keir Starmer’s Labour government to avoid past mistakes and to give new assemblies a real mandate for power:
The reasons the citizens’ juries and summits of the last Labour government failed to influence policy is because they were effectively low-profile focus groups, and they were too closely associated with the Labour party to build the broad support needed to catalyse change. The genius of the Irish citizens’ assembly is that it transcends party lines, and has become an accepted part of government apparatus, whoever leads the government.
📈 The latest OECD survey on trust in public institutions is out, published in full here. Notably, “a higher share of people (44%) across OECD countries had low or no trust in the national government than high or moderately high trust (39%).”
⏳ Apropos of this data, researchers Geoff Mulgan and Robyn Bennett explore the following question in a new paper: How to reflect the interests of future generations in today’s decisions? They write:
Orienting governments and societies towards the medium and long-term future is difficult, but not impossible. It is partly about mindsets, partly about institutions, and partly about processes. At its core is, first, a willingness to have an imagined conversation with people who do not yet exist, and second, a willingness to ensure that options are left open – that our descendants have choices… The examples summarised in this report confirm the value of creating an institutional form for the future generations agenda.
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