Western democracies in the 21st century still largely find their legitimacy in rhetorical prowess and promises—democracy’s meaning is found in its words and accompanying images. Means are severed from ends as structured and well reasoned political conversation spins endless political discourse and formal gestures out of touch and without substance. In mediated public debates, parliamentary discussions, and even recent democratic innovations, such as citizens’ assemblies, language is king.

Citizens’ assemblies aims to devolve power to people by inviting direct participation in agenda-setting and decision-making through the establishment of ‘deliberative mini-publics’ in which groups of citizens are selected by lottery to: Learn from each other and technical experts; weigh opinions and perspectives (deliberating); and devise policy. While citizens’ assemblies promise to bring democratic rupture, the extension of well-known practices of consensus-driven and future-oriented discursive politics risks conforming to status quo and the reproduction of treacherous discrepancies between ‘talking the talk' and ‘walking the walk’ … so to speak.

How might we attend to the spatial and material practices of citizens’ assemblies? And how can citizens’ assemblies act as democratic rupture that gives meaning to agencies otherwise overheard—human and non-human—and their differences by shifting attention from discursive to material and spatial practices?

Commoning, as a diverse range of practices of shared caretaking and creation of resources, brings material processes to the forefront of its politics and understands them as reciprocal and ecological systems. Similarly, arts-based education and place-based social organising, co-create change through what is sometimes referred to as ‘pre-figurative politics’—the embodiment of the collectively desired future where the means of struggle matches the ends. Here law is embodied in practice—it is walking and talking simultaneously.

What can we learn from the pre-figurative politics of commoning and co-creation? How is commoning and democracy already entangled with each other? How can deliberation embody desired futures-to-come?

In this event we will explore these questions through hands-on experiments in a workshop and a roundtable conversation with residents and activists from Vesterbro as well as local and international researchers and practitioners.

On the day you can look forward to meeting:

• Torange Khonsari: Co-founder and director of public works and former consultant for the Mayor of London. Author of Commons and Public Partnership Legitimizing a Commons Political Sphere out April 2026
• Gustav Nielsen: A Luxembourg-based Danish transdisciplinary artist, architect and doctoral researcher with Cultures of Assembly at the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Luxembourg.
• Rasmus Maabjerg: Founder of Rumgehør, an interdisciplinary studio working with architecture, design, art, and social innovation.
• Morten Roslev, Ungdommens Demokratihus (Youth Democracy House)

NB: TICKET LINK WILL COME LATER