Context and general idea
The greatest threat to democracy at the moment seems to come in the form of an attack by ultra-rich people like Trump or Musk. That threat, however, is possible only because the basis of democracy, its values and daily practices embodying them, is eroding. Or at least that basis cannot keep up the pace with the change of the surrounding society, culture and technologies. As a result, also the other aspect of democracy, institutions, have become vulnerable. There is a dire need for adding a new tier of democratic institutions that would regenerate citizen power to match complex, long-term challenges of our era.
Democracy fundamentally relies on the will and action of people. Therefore its basis cannot be reinforced in any other way than through greater/broader/wider mobilisation of people and doing so in new ways. Especially in cities that have a dual nature of being communities of people and palimpsests of (man-made) material world that impose strong path-dependencies and complex, perpetual structures of power (incl. financial).
We have heard time and time again that the current apathy is the result of the absence of a convincing vision, or perhaps multitudes of competing visions: Visions of good life, of liveable cities, humankind beyond sustainability transformation and planetary crisis. But where should that vision come from? If we were to follow democratic values the only credible source of such visions would be citizens, or perhaps conversations by citizens in the public sphere.
Task
Therefore, any citizen is entitled to start such a conversation that could explore elements of desirable futures. That could happen around a kitchen table, among friends, peers, neighbours or even among a random sample of acquaintances. Someone – and in this case it is YOU – has to take an initiative and invite people together.
And, this is how it goes: Invite 3-4-5 people to your kitchen table and reserve a minimum of 2-3 hours for running the panel. You can invite friends, peers, neighbours or even randomly selected people from your address book. Instruct them to prepare for a kitchen table citizen panel that aims to deliberate on a long-term vision for your city and its place on the planet. Request them to bring along items to build and, ultimately, archive your panel ideas. Those items can be their own notions on desirable futures, emotions and affects related to the future or things they observe in their material surroundings, on streets, homes, offices and public spaces.
Having a meaningful exchange on visions and, subsequently, radical, alternative futures is not an easy task, however. There are various kinds of impediments restricting our imagination, narrowing the focus of our thinking and biasing our judgements. Therefore people too often end up looping around current, immediate challenges and widely circulating narratives that tend to dominate our attention through media, politics and the commercial world. We therefore suggest to run your kitchen table panel through the following steps:
a – general direction aka vision?
b – archive & collect
c – how to use it for transformation?
Process and methods
What is needed is a) a method discovering a direction and stretching towards a vision, facilitating the conversation and documenting the results (so that it won’t end up being simply words vanishing in the air), b) an archive as a way of connecting conversations around various kitchen tables by collecting and sharing ideas, utopias and commitments between people and tables, and c) a script for a plan that outlines how to use the vision and its archived ingredients for a transformation.
a – The vision: Each panel participant describes and illustrates her vision for your city and its place on the planet to other participants, and to document it for further use.
We have to assume a wide enough understanding on how anticipatory attitudes and anticipatory systems as ingredients of visions appear: As assemblages that may contain materialities from streets, public spaces and other locations; historical narratives dominating current imaginaries; personal expectations; emotions and affects; various kinds of future-leaning practices, normative goals and utopias.
Kitchen table citizen panels should collect/build such anticipatory assemblages and help participants to make sense of the futures through constructive conversations on their respective assemblages. The task is to describe and illustrate the vision by each participant of a panel.
b – Archives of the future: Analyse and archive together items and ingredients of the visions.
The power of the kitchen table citizen panel is that it creates experience-based narrations of past-present-future. This is what makes it shareable with other people and capable of engaging other people under the same democratic practice. The situated assemblages brought into a panel should be collected as stories and images that include references to places, items, people and other actors, with their values, affects and other categories of anticipatory attitudes that help others in making sense of the future as experience in the panel and by panelists. For this we need a format for archiving, sharing and presenting vision and their auxiliary assemblages. This enables building empathy, aligning but also revealing a sense of (constructive) disagreement between other kitchen tables where archived visions can be re-visited and discussed.
c – Transformation: Sketch implementation of your vision.
There have to be ideas for first steps. That can include ways to explain the vision to the next people outside the kitchen, ways of experimenting some of its components (either in the physical world or virtually/mentally), and ideas on how to take it to the streets of your city. Ideation should also include initial ideas on how to integrate your transformation to legacy institutions of democracy and materialities of the city. This is how you start building legitimacy for your vision and thereby reinforce democratic values!
Outcomes and documentation
We invite you to consider various ways to document your kitchen table panel, including all three steps (a-b-c): photos, collages, videos, texts, pieces of artistic expression, music, …, a three course kitchen-table-panel-menu for futuring the city – or else. As a minimum, please bring an A1-poster (594 x 841 mm; vertical or horizontal) with your documentation and outcomes.
Please save the poster to the shared Teams group under the pre-assignment 1 folder. In case you have problems in printing out and bringing the poster, please contact Riina (riina.lundman@tuni.fi), so we can try to print the poster for you.
Looking forward to see the outcomes!