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Pre-print. J. Ramos & B. Dahiya (Eds.), Planetary Cities : Future-hacking the Urban. Springer
C.García Cataño
Dakar Senegal
contact@niitteknalogic.net
Organic cities
Carolina Garcia Cataño
To my father who so often takes me for a walk in the future
Abstract
This text aims to contribute to the creation of a new imaginary of planetary cities, as well as
provides references to existing theories and experiences of how to develop the transition to this new
imaganary. The text begins describing the current cities and the cities to come by counterposing the
idea of chaos, one as a result of top-down urban planing, antoher one as a living body with an
organic urban development. Once set up the imaginary of the planetary city, the second section
introduces the transition to it based on “Buen Vivir”, degrowth and free and open culture. Section
three rethinks territorial structure and scalability. While section four questions the taken for granted
economic principles and opens new ways to think about economic solutions. Section five focuses
on possible governance alternatives, not based on representative democracy.
As text also introduces a patchwork of imaginary visions, where we want to include perspectives
coming from the Global South. Cities in permanent movement, with different needs and wishes,
where perception of time and space differs, and sociability is diverse. Identifying the difference and
learning from it will enable us to build a more accurate vision of future planetary cities and
guarantee better cooperation between all.
Keywords
Planetary cities, commons, diversity, buen vivir, self-gouvernance, decentralisation, network,
collaboration, cooperation, sharing, degrowth, chaos, free culture, FLOSS, citizenship
1 The chaotic order vs the organic chaos.
1.1 The chaotic order
Skyscrapers, cement, glass, metal. Pollution clouds over the skyline.
Streets paved either asphalt or paving stones. Streets designed as a
grid. Between streets, blocks of houses, brick, cement, stone, steel,
glass. The city is hard. It has been made hard. There are few traces of
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nature, some boulevards, trees, green corners just an aesthetic element
- it doesn’t belong there. Cities are built to be outside the reach of
nature. Industrial dirt is a sign of development. Cars, trucks, bikes,
buses, motorbikes, trains, planes. Noise. Horns. Squeaks. Creaks.
Horns. Hammering. Horns. Fences. School fences, park fences, clubs
fences. Market fences. Camp fences. Up. Border fences up. Up. Light.
Street light. Shops lights. Bright. Ads light. Pollution. Noise. Light. Air.
Nature? Humanity?
The chaotic order of current cities is the result of the industrial era. As factories started to increase,
people began to migrate to cities. Cities, not prepared to host the flow of arrivals, became
overcrowded and unhealthy. The first urban diseases began to appear and social concern around
health and hygiene grew and the urge and need of urban planning arose. The need to address
hygiene and health in a systematic way and in order to make urban intervention effective, forced
urban planning to take shape.
This way cities started to be thought in terms of strategic planning, the urban ground began to be
regulated, massively urbanized, but designed in offices or architectural bureaus. Urban design is
done far from citizens. Professionals have given themselves the right to define how cities should be
lived in without involving participatory processes. Cities are designed to serve the needs of
capitalism. People are left behind. Suburbs, neighbourhoods composed by working class, low-
income and precarious people continue to have overcrowded spaces. No public infrastructure, no
green areas, lack of cleaning services, pollution, electricity cuts, water scarcity, no public spaces.
Meanwhile city centers, show the illusion of prosperity, happiness, wealth, progress, becoming
centers of consumerism, commerce, financial power. Lives are on sale. The heart of the city is
drained. Urban planners give a chaotic order to the city which does not match the needs of people
living in it. Architecture and urban planning are reinforcing the promotion of growth-fuelled
worldviews. This architecture produced spaces exclusive to many, with costly, resource-demanding
materials and construction techniques, and often involving highly exploitative labour relations with
its workers.
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1.2 The organic chaos
Soft and warm the sand was entering the sandals. The sidewalks hard
pavement had been removed some years ago. There were evergreen
trees at each side of wide streets. Behind the first row of buildings, the
corn fields could be seen. At night, the breeze brought the smell of the
mangoes trees and it mixed in the buzz of the fair phones, the chatting,
the music and the sound of the 3D printer printing some sanitary
material.
No cars to be heard or seen, from the last meeting came the collective
decision to leave the car sharing pool outside the neighbourhood,
except for those vehicles used for internal transport needs or in case of
sick/handicapped/old people, that could have one at their disposal.
Inside the neighbourhood you could use bikes, horses, carts, skates,
drones. The street, paved not so long ago, was showing some cracks,
so the workshop in the parallel street, was preparing the bio-asphalt to
repair it. It is by the 3D printer workshop, and was founded by some
girls who, since long, had been prototyping new types of bio-asphalt.
One year ago, they found a working product and now they started
opening workshops where people would produce it themselves under
demand, no need to store, just use what you need.
The sewage system was working smoothly after some months
calculating the right spot where to put the drains. Before, streets got
over-flooded, and drains blocked. Now after many trial-errors the robots
were managing to report in advance all issues of the drains so the
maintenance working group could plan any needed intervention.
The workshops rotated moving to areas where they were needed.
Rotation was normal, it helped meet the different local demands. Once
workshops moved out, sports centers, dance halls, recording studios or
a leisure common spaces would pop up.
The city as a chorale of multiples voices in continuous movement expressing, dreams, desires,
experiences and knowledge. Cities as intersection places, shaped based on the diversity, difference
and plurality coming from migration and knowledge sharing. As Felwine Sarr,Afrotopia (2016)
describes a city that “ can be thought sometimes as a place, sometimes as a territory, sometimes as
a circularity or an organic totality. It is a living body engaged in a process of growth and
metamorphosis”
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City commons infrastructures increases, by including urban resources: housing, health care, water,
transport, electricity, learning spaces, green areas and it prevents these from being sold off. A
commons that feeds a decentralized IoT network, managed by cooperative and collaboration values.
Urban plans instead of developing rigidly-thought-of cities in offices, making people adapt to them,
will assume that cities are dynamic systems with a higher component of chaos, which within its
apparent randomness underlies interconnectedness, constant feedback and self-organization in order
to respect its diversity and different ways of living. The city is adapting to its people, leaving
unfinished spaces for creativity in the permanent construction of our cities, is also possible as a way
of building our cities. Decentralized urban design develops an organic architecture based on
collective interventions of the public – space is a product of the multiplicity of relationships born of
the city through participatory processes.
Borders fade out, as city structure becomes a fractal, replicating itself at different scales. The city
will be less a superstructure but a replication of production modes and meanings. Meanings which
inform our social and political reality, but above all about our imaginations and projections. Buen
vivir as governance principle brings back community practices, it is not growth-fuelled but
respectful to Pachamama/Mother Earth, as is the respect to our mother nature the one that allows us
to live in full harmony as human beings.
2 Transition time. From death to life.
DEATH. They kept drowning, they kept buying. They kept fainting. They
kept consuming. They kept shouting. They kept silence. They kept
surviving. Mass graves stored daily, dozens of corpses on the beach,
on the dunes, on the sidewalks. Plastic lives, plastic goods, pollution.
Everybody kept looking away, but the moment came when there was
nowhere else to look. They were us, we were them, it was time to stop.
STOP. The amount of things reduced, no private cars, no big factories,
no huge corporations, no useless objects. Recycling. Upcycling. Reuse.
Creativity. Degrowth. Care. Autonomy. Imagination. Sustainability. Buen
vivir. LIFE.
Chaotic growth is death. Our system of unlimited growth is causing a collapse at social, political,
economic and ecological levels. In a world with limited resources, development associated to
growth-productivity-consumerism is unsustainable.
The current productivist and extractivist model is exhausting natural resources and is the main cause
of climate change. As a result of climate change, we are witnessing an increasing number of natural
disasters, droughts, floods, hurricanes, causing mass migrations, displacements, generalized
impoverishment and systematic violations of human rights. The increase in the gap between rich
and poor, is producing a global imbalance, fuelling protests as well as increasing the level of state-
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led repression. The increase of state-led violence and the investment on war industry gives us a hint
on how death is driving political and economic policies in 21st century. This death-driven politics
has been called by A. Mbembe as Necropolitics (2003), “War, after all, is as much a means of
achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining politics as a form of war,
we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or
slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?”.
Sovereign states are shaped by war, leading an economy based on the efficiency of killing, the arms
industry, genocides the excuse for growth, power deciding who should live and who should die.
Racism, colonialism intrinsic to capitalism. Denial of diversity.
In a transition time, we want to go from death to life. Putting life in the middle is one of the main
principles of the Latin American indigenous cosmovision Buen vivir (living well, or living well
together), which understands the human experience as holistically integrated with the rest of the
community and nature. Compared to the logic of chaotic growth and accumulation, Buen Vivir
promotes the ethics of ‘enough’ for the whole community, prioritizing harmonious living with
nature – it expands the concept of community to include the air, water, mountains, trees and animals
that make up our ecosystem (Hernández Sánchez, 2009h; Eduardo Gudynas and Alberto Acosta,
2011;, Rauber, 2015)”.
In western societies, where the connection to ancestors is diluted, and the understanding of Buen
Vivir is just beginning, the hypothesis of degrowth can bring a transitional moment to sustainability.
Theorist Vicente Honorant defines degrowth as "an individual and collective management based on
the reduction of the total consumption of raw materials, energy and natural spaces". (29)
Degrowth is often associated with scarcity, impoverishment, and lack of access to welfare. This
kind of “degrowth” is the result of capitalist accumulation of richness of 1% versus 99%, who are
excluded from having a decent life.
Instead, the existence of a joyful degrowth as Julio Garcia Camarero (2010) calls it in his book,
would mean the redistribution of the planet's wealth among all of its inhabitants. It would mainly
affect the 1%, that is the elites and plundering oligarchies as their wealth would be distributed,
while the 99% would be affected in less degree, standard consumerist would be partially affected,
responsible consumerists not at all, and those left out of the welfare state would have a measured
and transitory growth.
Joyful degrowth enhances human existence by living in harmony with our environment in all its
facets, social, economic and environmental. In order to achieve this, joyful degrowth intertwines the
concepts of care, autonomy and sustainability.
Care, as all those behaviours aimed at meeting a need whether emotional or physical, between
ourselves, those close to us, society and nature.
Autonomy is the ability to give rules to ourselves, not imposed but decided collectively and
consciously.
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Sustainability is the balance between human needs and nature, synthesised perfectly by Mahatma
Gandhi when he said “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everuone’s
greed”.
As well as joyful degrowth, future cities have to incorporate new ways of producing, locally and
based on creativity; therefore, knowledge has to be shared through cooperative and collaborative
processes while decentralized and distributed structures will facilitate participation in decision-
making processes.
In current times, there is the knowledge, the structure, the know-how and the technologies to
implement processes and solutions at a local level that would change the paradigm from big
centralized national industry to multiple high-tech workshop spaces distributed at a city level. The
appearance of computers and Internet have democratized not only access to knowledge but to
micro-robotic production too, through the use of free hardware we find 3D printers as rep-rap,
Arduino robotics, industrial machines, Wikihouse, open prostheses.
Free and open culture movement opened a new paradigm, including science, turning it into open
science.
We have to remember that free and open culture movement started within the free software
community, driven by Richard M. Stallman, after hacking copyright law by creating GPL free
software license which gives 4 freedoms to users[1]. Together with GPL, it was developed copyleft
license which was intended for other forms of intellectual property. Since copyleft freedoms were
seen as too radical for the artistic world and other creatives, Lawrence Lessig among others,
extended the licenses to add certain restrictions (not included in copyleft) for all creative works,
giving place to Creative Commons licenses and to a broader movement which started to be called
“Free and open culture movement”. Other domains have joined the free culture movement as is the
case of science, creating the concept of Open Science. Open Science is based on the belief that the
creation of knowledge is bidirectional, and that any citizen can be a contributor to science and with
training can engage in scientific collaborative process. Despite not belonging to a scientific
institution, people can still take part in open science processes for solving social challenges. The
development of open science with participatory solutions will generate social impact and provide
better solutions for society as Alessandro Delfanti describes in BIOHACKERS. The Politics of
Open Science (2013).
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Definition of the Four Freedoms in Free software in Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms)
1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source
code is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so
that the whole community benefits.
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Also arts would recognize the value of remix, as part of cultural heritage. Mixing, copying,
modifying and sharing will use collaborative processes to create new artifacts. This way artists will
be recognized as knowledge producers, not just as entertainers, since art provides, as dancer Omar
Sene describes it, “a way in which we can explore ourselves and our position in the world at large,
as well as a way to exchange with others what we see, feel, think and experience. It is a way to open
dialogue within and between individuals and communities” (34)
3 Cities-network as territorial structure.
Doing the queue, the map’s update was downloading, new nodes had
been added to the map. Buzz. Cali, Rosario, Los llanos. Buzz. Dalifort,
Berlin, San José, Trieste, Hong Kong. Now, maps are not based on
physical borders. Now territories are the physical extension of a
personal network. Each network is based on places with the presence
of family, friends, affinity groups, or areas of interest. Swiping from one
city to the next, through links and relations, they could be shown or
hidden. Maps change continuously, new nodes pop up or disappear,
people change places, new interests here or there. Associated to each
network, sometimes overlapping are natural resources and
infrastructures. All part of the Commons. All managed collectively.
Everything had started in moments of pandemic, war, despair, fragility,
but underneath things were ready for change.
Scalability is one of the challenges that any organizational system faces.
Over the last five centuries we can see that the social model taken to scale has been, what in
software development domain is called, the cathedral model. We can make an abstraction and the
nation states follows the cathedral model, defined by Eric Steven Raymond (“The Cathedral & the
Bazaar ...” 2001, pag. 2), as, the model “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of
mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time” A states
centralized approach depends on a limited sized and group, that decides the design and the needs of
a region, city or nation, and which has been proven to not be the most effective, nor long-term
sustainable and nor flexible strategy to adapt to new needs, in particular the dramatically new needs
of the future.
Cities promised a better life, access to jobs and educational, health, cultural opportunities. This has
caused migration from rural to urban areas where people have ended up concentrating in large
numbers. The centralization of services and modern infrastructures in urban areas has not been able
to provide the expected opportunities to the cities, nor to the rural areas, which remain
underdeveloped. Despite bad governance as a critical and fundamental issue, the fact of trying to
govern millions of people, implies an assumed homogenization, ignoring nuances, the impossibility
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to manage difference and diversity, and the loss of unique needs that create unbalanced societies.
The increasing social and economic gaps happening in the cities are an indicator of its
unsustainability.
However, we are witnessing how suburbs like towns and villages are being revitalized. Open and
free culture is bringing empowering cultural and economic opportunities. Technology is
democratizing access to knowledge and communication. This enables people to take part in finding
solutions to common problems, as well as its enabling distributed use and creation of state of the art
technologies. Villages will become the intersection point where we will find our ancestor’s
knowledge, technology and free culture knowledge. This emerging vision can be seen as part of
cosmolocalism, which as described by Ramos (2021) “rests on the power of IIDEAS which stands
for:
Ideas - these can be concepts, ideas for change, and the realm of knowledge. Open
knowledge potentiates communities with deeper understanding and capabilities;
Innovations - these are any artifacts from an innovation process, and can be reproduced or
re-iterated;
Designs - these are the often ready to use ways of manufacturing products, or can be the
detailed specifications for a product;
Experiments - these are processes to try something new with a community. It is possible to
do open experimentation, where a planetary community can learn from one community’s
experiment;
Actions - specific practices people use to create change, that can be examples for others;
Solutions - ways that a problem is definitely resolved, and which can be shared.
There are cities (including towns and villages) carrying out IIDEAS in the political framework, as
is municipalism, which are challenging state structures. Municipalism aims to develop a new politic
based on self-organisation and promotion of the commons. Its aim is to bring social change by
focusing on implementing solutions at municipal level. Fearless cities, as a municipalist global
approach, is creating a global city network that through democratic participatory processes, is
searching for alternatives to improve city life while standing up to defend human rights, democracy
and the common good.
The city’s role is being reinforced as the immediate environment for public intervention. At the
same time, we are witnessing how through social networks, communities are being created to
support and facilitate learning processes as well as becoming providers. We have seen this example
during the first wave of COVID19 pandemic. In this period, the maker community has been key in
providing sanitary material to healthcare staff. A network with more than ten thousand users at a
global level coordinated to teach, learn and provide their local community, for example,
Coronavirus makers community (2). This is a clear example of how state of the art technology
arrives to houses and workshops, and where there has been a coordination in a network of
households, small companies, factories and city institutions.
In the case of the pandemic, social responsibility taken by anonymous citizens has driven different
actors to work together for the well being of their community/region/country, while nation-states
have not played the expected role It can be presumed the coronavirusmakers’ successful case can be
taken as a model for other situations where collective intelligence, working in a cooperative way,
2 http://world.coronavirusmakers.com/
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can increase the commons wealth and wellbeing. This “way to globally link local communities in
distributed networks of shared exchange, bringing production and consumption closer together” is
described as cosmolocalism in “Cosmolocalism: Understanding the Transitional Dynamics
Towards Post-Capitalism” (2020,pag 1) .
Therefore, the distributed city-networks with high access to connectivity can establish P2P (Peer to
Peer) social forms of organization, community lead self-organisation as an alternative to nation-
states. . P2P networks as a social structure model, can be considered a fractal, and as happens with
fractals[3] in chaos theory[4], can be a way to build complex social structures which replicate
themselves at different scales. If we apply the idea of fractals to city organization, we would
establish at a local scale, decision-making mechanisms than can enable citizens to design the city
they need and define its governance. At the next scale, natural resources and common
infrastructures will be managed through social contracts agreed by network nodes which will be
periodically revised to verify that match citizen needs. We can recognize in this, the Philé (David de
Ugarte, 2009) which “defining characteristic is its transnational character...The phyle brings a
meaning, a social sense to the work, cultural forms and relationships of its members where the
national can no longer do so: collective production developed for a globalized market by a
transnational community.”
4 Economic dimension.
Bip-bip the notification arrived, in 48h the money will expire. Normally I
would go to his place to exchange it, I don’t know how but he manages
to spend the money soon before expiration date. This time he was
traveling so I would have to see how to do it, because to pay the
renewal fee was too high, it made no sense. After accessing to the p2p
platform I decided to exchange it for hours in the time bank, this would
allow me to use 2.5h until the end of the month.
Economy is the system that allocates resources to meet people’s needs and wants, and is in charge
of defining how goods (products and services) and resources will be created, maintained and
distributed. Therefore, governments should make use of economy to guarantee that the wealth
created reaches its citizens as well as assure their well-being. However, economy is no longer in
government hands, but in hands of the financial system since governments have become submissive
to it. A financial system that has blurred nation-states’ rigid border definition, and works on market
places, configuring a network of cities (New York, London, Tokyo, etc) and where corporations
play the main role. A financial system that, as Heather Marsh argues in Binding Chaos (2013, pag
51) “functions as a means to tie the work that is done for corporations to basic essentials such as
food and housing in an entirely artificial relationship”, while it does not feel obliged to respect
human rights treaties.
3 A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different
scales.
4 Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary theory stating that, within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex
systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity,
fractals, and self-organization.
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Economy from being a system to provide well-being has turned into a system that through
corporations perpetuates slavery in all its forms.
Colonialism and extractivism is the way through which governments become suppliers of natural
resources to corporations. Human labor is happening in slavery working conditions since
transnational and global reach of the financial system has detached it from any legal framework
facilitating labor acts that reduce workers’ rights.
Employment is the current link between citizens and the economy. Jobs are said to be the best way
to distribute wealth but is far from being true. The lack of employment is creating poverty and
inequality. So the possibility of losing employment is a permanent menace in today’s economy;
however, to cover the basic needs, people accept their exploitative work conditions.
The cities have become the economic centers, causing centralization and accumulation of the
population in big urban areas. Urban planning, in these big cities reinforces inequality by being
thought to include poverty not to eradicate it, for example, displacing working places far away
from living areas, consuming population’s time and causing tiredness , as is pointed out by Byung-
Chul Han (2015) in Burnout Society. Tiredness prevents people from having spare time for
socializing and developing creative activities. As a product of collective tiredness, human emotions
are degraded, where isolation, individualism and fear invade life. Fear is enslaving people and
making them scared of : migrants, automation, and the like. These are unfunded menaces since the
world production capacity has not decreased; the problem remains in redistribution since nowadays
accumulation of goods are in the hands of few.
So, the challenge is how to redistribute our global richness. There is the proposal of Universal
Basic Income (UBI), where people’s basic needs are guaranteed. This includes food, housing, health
care, education, lifework, family. UBI is seen with mistrust since it is taken for granted that global
production is linked to labor work done and that by having a fix income many people would not
want to work, but on one hand we have to take into account degrowth and on the other hand
consider that technology can release humans from most of automated work.
So fear to UBI’s proposal comes from the uneasiness that causes the fact of increasing citizens
freedoms and the possible outcome of people assembling to carry out creative processes, not
submitted to power structures (corporation, financial systems, states).
We can see the Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) model as a success case, and how it has
influenced innovation, in both science and arts. Human beings, as social beings, need to be useful to
their community, the bigger challenge is to improve social living conditions and be able to
contribute to collective wealth, therefore to enable the possibility to take part in the solution of
social problems guarantees citizen’s active participation. There are many proposals on how to
distribute UBI and there have been both robust and partial experiments in certain countries, like
cases in Kenya, Namibia, Finland, Canada etc.; in most cases, it has shown that it benefits people’s
wellbeing and does not affect work supply. (needs several references here).
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Let’s consider how cities could practice The proposal would be to have a distributed p2p economy
where the peers, would receive a fix income based on global production. This percentage would not
necessarily be based on one currency but multiple currencies can co-exist with goods or time. For
example, when certain machines’ time usage would be distributed, direct access to pieces, lab
materials or access to production studios when recording an album, or usage time of venues when
doing dance, theater or rehearsals, food distribution would be based on local and non-local network
affinity groups. Ultimately, the “product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a
community of users” making use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common
property regimes as M. Bauwens defines it in The Political Economy of Peer Production (2006,
pag1).
Establishing that accumulation is the main factor to social inequality, together with UBI; another
proposal is to have an expiring currency. Silvio Gesell proposed this already in the 19th century. It
would see money with an expiration date and in order to avoid expiration it should be “renewed” by
paying a fee. This way saving money would cost money, therefore it would prevent money
“storage” and instead motivate people to spend it or invest it in shorter periods of time. Money
expiration would have not only on an impact at the economic level but also at a social level since it
would stop being the social goal.
5 Active citizenship.
Today I’m in a rush, in an hour we are having a meeting. I still have to
glue the last pieces of the mock-up, the 3D printer was not well
calibrated so glue came to the rescue. It’s the health care center waiting
room mock-up. I’m curious how will it look, a health care center
conceived collectively. Buzz. Notification. Remember to bring mock-ups
to the first floor. True, the mock-ups will be exposed, we’ll see all the
proposals, then we will continue the discussion on how to build the
health care center. Today we will have the input from both the architect
together with the baker. They’ll teach us about construction material and
structures, and what’s important to take into account when we think
about environment and sustainability. Finished. Now, on my way.
The failure of representative democracy becomes more evident every day, as we see all over the
world, societies discontent, the distance and mistrust that political institutions go through and how
people are rising up against them. Despite countries, continents and different contexts, the fact that
people are asking for a change of political system is undeniable. The change has to take into
account citizens’ voices, and open genuine decision-making processes where people can get
engaged, and therefore be part of defining a city’s and society’s governance. Sheila Foster and
Christian Iaione in “The City as a Commons” (2016, pag 55) describe it as “urban collaborative
governance” that is “a system which at its core redistributes decision making power and influence
away from the center and towards an engaged public.”
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There have been many attempts to reinvent politics; some approaches come back to the idea of
making cities more visible, as its the case of municipalism, which reinforces political action at a city
level. Also we can find the concept of “party-movement” where the political party is composed
partially by people coming from social movements organized in the cities, towns, villages, or
political parties following Internet logic when claiming, more online access, network structure,
distributed participation, as Pirate Party or X Party (531). But none of these achieved the expected
results, since they ended up either disappearing or reproducing conventional political party’s ways
of doing.
In the last few years, some other approaches for choosing parliamentary members have been
proposed; we can highlight sortition, which is the selection of political representatives in parliament
as a random sample of the population. The aim is to have an emblematic sample of society to be
represented, this way diversity will be present, no sector will be underrepresented, and the decisions
made by this parliament would represent an intuitive social wide agreement.
Another approach is liquid democracy, an hybrid between direct democracy and representative
democracy; liquid democracy, a form of collective decision making, allows voters to either vote
directly on issues or delegate their voting power to delegates, delegation being domain specific and
punctual.
To use the peer-to-peer network model as a political form would be a possible challenge, which is to
set up a structure that facilitates peer-to-peer self-organization and encourages inclusive discussions
that will arrive to find solutions in specific contexts. The aim is not to pretend to find a solution for
all but to build trust and common criteria that can increase the number of people taking part in the
search for solutions. This framework would feed the commons and increase knowledge sharing. In
such systems there is a mechanism where an idea can be freely proposed and developed by a person
or a group of people to which other people adhere in a spontaneous way to continue the
development through discussions and finding collective criteria until it is implemented at a local
level; we can call this process stigmergy. We can consider Cecosesola cooperative(4) a use case,
which shows the importance of opening spaces for discussions, where permanent interaction
between members gives the option to participate directly or indirectly in discussions taking place
regarding collective governance, building a feeling of trust that is able to sustain the collective
governance despite errors or failures.
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BOOM. Heads turn. ZAS. Hands on the phone. CLIC. Recording.
Everything blows up. BAWL. An eviction. Buzz. Shared. Tear gas. A
protest. Buzz. Shared. Shared. Buzz. Buzz. Immediacy. CRASH. Your
house, demolished. Steel and glass skyscraper built. WOW. Someone’s
pockets full. People thrown out to the street. POP IN, it’s right there
before your eyes. The afternoon breeze brings the smell of the mango
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Party
13
trees. People sitting in the street are making tea. You can hear the coal
frizzle, while the smell of mint fills up the corner. The tea pouring
resembles the sound of the cascade in the mountains. The trees giving
her shadow as she walks slowly dragging her feet. On one hand, her
3D just printed a chair. On the other hand, the corn harvested in the
corner, time to cook Mukimo. At sunset, people start to do their evening
walk along the riverside. Buzz. Lov. Laughs. Life flows with intensity
and no hurry. TRUST.
14
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