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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.

In the Roundtable each participant presents 10 minutes on a specific project and then we proceed to have a conversation about participant work and the work produced in the workshop. Moderated by Gustav Nielsen:

Speakers:

Torange Khonsari (London Met. Uni. / Public Works)

Commons and Public Partnership: Legitimising a Commons Sphere (Book)

Ingrid Rahbek & Morten Roslev (Ungdommens Demokratihus)

Ungdommens Demokratihus som rum for demokrati og fællesskab

Annika Agger (RUC)

On Klima, Demokrati og Samskabelse (Book)

Louisa Mathies & Johan Galster (We Do Democracy)

On Renten Transition Nordvest

Rasmus Maabjerg (Rumgehør)

On Rumgehør and Co-creation with Young People (Urban Lab Aarhus)

Lars Tønder (University of Southern Denmark)

On Power in the Anthropocene (Book)