Urban Design as a Form of Agonistic Democratic Expression

Democracy and Urban Design

There is a gap between the meaning and practice of democracy. Steven Bilakovics (2012) presents some contradictions in the general acceptance of definitions of democracy. According to Bilakovics, the conceptualization of democracy does not include the empowered participation of the people. Democratic systems underestimate the power of control policies and the influence of economic agents in the decision-making process. These issues increased the level of mistrust among people living in democratic systems. Voters tend to be disappointed in their government, and thus, democracy loses its validity in the eyes of the majority, which, in turn, could damage politicians’ credibility.

This contradiction observed by Bilakovics (2012) recalls the analysis of Chantal Mouffe (1999), who called for the resignation of the consensual model of democratic politics in favor of the values of antagonism and mobilizing passions for defining a new democratic design based on what she theorized as “agonistic democracy”: a pluralist approach to decision making in which dissensus is highly valued. Mouffe unveiled a significant contradiction in the way in which democracy was absorbed by a previously agreed-on deliberative decision-making process between representatives. This process implied the dissolution of political borders between ideological projects. In consensual democracies, left-wing and right-wing parties were organized in the political center, thus excluding the people’s will from the debate and producing neutrality for the sake of a small elite group. Therefore, the value of difference and the power of arguments were agonized. Discussions became meaningless mirages of discernment, a façade of dissent for hiding a common agenda.

Furthering Mouffe’s argument, Jacques Rancière (2010) postulates the urgency of adding dissensus to democratic discernment. Rancière argues that dissensual relationships among stakeholders increase the possibility of achieving real social transformations. Rancière asserts the presence of a paradox in a democracy that strives against the collective construction of a nation because the government feels threatened by a social body that defends its democratic mandate. To avoid the democratic discussion in its ideal form, the state represses people through violence to control outbreaks of agonistic democracy from the eventually empowered democratic aspirations of voters. This contradiction emerges when a stakeholder rejects dissensus as an unhealthy component of democracy.

For Rancière, dissensus is a cross-cutting cultural discourse that introduces new subjects and multiscalar objects with a perception (material and sensitive) and creates a new aesthetic representation of social relations (Rancière, 2010). If repression emerges from ending social disagreements between authority figures and people, the richness of dissensual aesthetics is constrained and is only visible when contested spaces are manifested through spatial practices.

The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen; it places one world in another—for instance, the world where the factory is a public space in that where it is considered private, the world where workers speak, and speak about the community, in that where their voices are mere cries expressing pain. (Rancière, 2010, p. 38)

When a gap in the sensible and reasoning is demonstrated on the space, the city becomes a resource for infusing a new sense of democratic experiences based on spatial operations emerging from these gaps mentioned by Rancière. Thus, urban design may serve to spatialize the dissensual voices of the oppressed by the consensual dogma and advance toward new dimensions of democratic experiences, in which the voice of the powerless is upgraded; its volume increases in intensity such that even the built environment must change to adapt the urban to new politics on the space.

Organized citizenship for contesting the not-so-democratic decisions of those in positions of authority has been seen as a sign of a discrepancy between how consensual democracy is working in different parts of the world and how people expect it to work (Invernizzi-Accetti & Wolkenstein, 2017). This condition, which may be interpreted as people’s discontent with democracy, is linked to its failures, rather than with its idea of ideal functioning, which will demand the exploration of ways to improve the actual representativeness of processes of decision making (Schmitter, 2015). At the very least, this contradiction implies that authority figures do not understand what democracy means for the people they represent (Swyngedouw, 2011b).

Cities represent the complex social relationships that form them (Lefebvre, 1991). Therefore, the analysis of the way in which cities are produced and the enquiry into the social relations that shape the built environment may provide resources to reflect on how the gap between democracy as it is practiced (or “real democracy”) and democracy in its ideal form is materialized in the city. Mark Purcell (2013) observed that the power to make political decisions is concentrated, held by only a few members of a nation. These members have their own particular interests and connections, and they can interfere with the development of democratic governments in pursuit of their interests. In the end, the few rule the many.

In Purcell’s interpretation, elected officials widen the gap between real democracy and the people’s ideal democracy when they act in their own interests instead of those of the people. While the city represents its elite, the contestations against the urban form may well represent an interpretation of democracy that is much different than indicated by spatial practices.

Henri Lefebvre (1967) explored the coercive condition of democracy, eventually developing a way to flip democratic practices from top-down to bottom-up through an idea that he called “the right to the city.” The right to the city emerged as a political agenda for democratizing urbanization processes and promoting the benefits of urban life (Grazian, 2004), thus empowering communities to shape their environments (and themselves) in the process (Harvey, 2008). The right to the city is a spatialized dispute for defining the form of urban life through contested urbanisms (Boano, Hunter, & Newton, 2013). The people’s spatialized political reflection on the city they want organizes as contested urbanisms into a manifesto expressed through the built environment.

The Clash in the Urban Space: The Last Bastion of Dissensual Democracy

While the city is alive and thriving, at least in some of its spaces, the polis as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation the spacing of (often radical) dissent and disagreement, as well as the place where political subjectivization emerges, is performed, thus literally taking place, and seems moribund. In other words, the polis as a “political” space is retreating while social space is increasingly colonized or sutured by consensual techno-managerial policies. (Swyngedouw, 2011a, p. 11)

In light of the consensual rule of decision-making processes, dissensus appears to be an extinct feature of society, which could cause individualism to increase (Hendriks, 2010), and through which citizens’ interest in politics decreases as democracy reduces to only the act of voting while any other opportunities to participate in decision making are scarce.

All of this seems like a masked disruption. In reality, partisan politics are about agreements, not disputes. In a consensual democracy, conflicts are not voracious, and any changes that are made rarely affect the ruling elite. As a result, people have lost confidence in the power of voting, and voter turnout around the world has declined since the early 1990s (IDEA, 2016).

With democracy in a crisis, citizens are finding new ways to express their political will, consequently questioning the effectiveness of representative democracies through spatial manifestations (Mayer, 2016). Collective activities in the form of self-representative democratic actions have reshaped the urban space. A better ballot box, therefore, is found in the public space, as these spaces (in contrast with traditional democratic institutions) amplify the people’s voices.

Thus, the appropriation of public spaces for changing their meanings constitutes a politico-spatial practice. As Sudjic (2005) puts it, “Unlike science and technology, which have conventionally been presented as being free of ideological connotations, architecture is both a practical tool and an expressive language, capable of carrying highly specific messages” (p. 9). Such messages are built collectively across a city. To construct the experience of democratic urban life, the meanings of these messages need to be part of political agendas; the power of the people is manifested partially as political instruments in public spaces. Therefore, its reliability would be better if it were considered.

David Harvey (2012) states that the public space has frequently been transformed by social actions aimed at enhancing access to public spaces and public goods so that people can reform them according to their interests. Urban designers can actively participate in this endeavor because, in the age of consensual democracy, the contestation of public spaces requires a technical translation, an urban form.

Erik Swyngedouw (2011b) asserts that governments face a new scenario as public spaces become a nest for empowered actors where manifestations call for the democratization of democracy and reveal a paradox linked with Mark Purcell’s views on the public space as a political resource for contesting mainstream politics (Purcell, 2008). In recent years, mainstream politics have been shown to be incapable of adapting democratic institutions to the most urgent demands of citizens (e.g., climate change, inequality, discrimination, xenophobia, and human rights).

Citizens employ the public space to call attention to this incapability, using the city as a politico-spatial arena to imagine society beyond the limits that consensus imposes on it. If utopian thinking is to exist, it does so in the protests in the streets, charged with political meaning. Therefore, these processes imply a narrative for urban designers, which underlies the way in which people reorganize public spaces to communicate with authorities and decision makers. Recalling Mouffe’s idea, agonistic explorations in cities would infuse the use of urban design to foster a dissensus democracy.

The design of a democratic public space for an agonistic democracy may put pressure on the existent institutional framework. Indeed, people have been chasing profound political transformations from the streets for a long time. Margit Mayer (2009) states that urban movements have been a part of the politics of resistance for the past 40 years. These movements have transformed the way in which we understand cities and society. They occupy the public space and assign meanings to different parts of cities to construct a popular symbolism that recalls the motto of each political struggle. The public space developed by the consensual democracy serves as a place for people to contest political struggles in various ways, such as manifestations, marches, occupations, artistic interventions, lasting spatial changes, and riots. Dissensus politics on democracy have a history of surviving in the public space.

Political Principles for Agonistic Urban Design

A city thriving in democratic realization through contestation constitutes a fertile field of meaningful encounters and contradictions to analyze its spatial practices. Urban designers are trained to define the form of a public space from the values of the space, the social needs of those living near the space, and the possibilities of the space (Canniffe, 2006; Carmona, 2014; Rapoport, 1977). Democratic experiences, and political experiences in general, can be designed if democracy is theorized under the scope of everyday social relations in a public space (Eade & Mele, 2008). As Amos Rapoport (1987, 1992) reflects, the environment is not only a sum of its constructions but also an articulation of the relationships and possibilities of meaningful spaces through which people can interpret their environment.

For Mark Purcell (2006), cities are battlefields where a civil society struggles against unfairness. These struggles have a cultural meaning and a valuable message (Imbroscio & Spinner-Halev, 2013; Payne & Barbera, 2010), which may be uncovered by a critical analysis of its spatial representation (Brenner, 2009; Soja, 1980) to build theoretical reflections on urban design as an agonistic instrument. This instrument may serve to reinvigorate democracy by restoring the political definition of cities (Purcell, 2006). While democracy is undergoing a crisis, urban design may allow people to reassess the spatiality of democracy and contribute to more democratic cities by validating struggles that are already reshaping spaces and changing the political meaning of cities through contested urbanisms. In this way, urban design may be useful in reimagining the utopian democratic city (Rodríguez, 1983).

Previous theoretical explorations contribute to this idea. Democratic cities would explore different democratic experiences to promote an open-ended process of spatial production, as suggested by Stevens and Dovey (2004). Such a design can create opportunities for new generations to redefine their urban spaces in order to represent their era (Sklair, 2006). Furthermore, open-ended spaces in which the project is originally planned to be modified in time would ease future interventions, as an urban adaptation of progressive design, thus avoiding a perpetuated urban configuration, in the form and incorporating into the plan the very possibility of implementing large-scale changes over time.

Therefore, lightweight architecture and lighter infrastructural developments appear suitable to support spatial outcomes for urban spaces aiming to foster democratic ways of designing the city. Also, these transformable spaces can permit a constant process of spatial dialectics in an agonistic process represented within a city. When reviewing potential connections between agonism and political agendas for democratizing cities, the political manifesto of the right to the city seems to adhere to agonistic principles. Specifically, the right to the city calls for people to reclaim their right to reshape areas of the city according to their needs and expectations, desires and ideas, and wills and (dis)agreements (Lefebvre, 1970). Connecting these principles with an agonistic agenda for urban design, it is clear that a dissensus stage of democratic deliberation seems unavoidable; it can be oriented toward a spatial manifestation using urban design. However, prioritizing consensus-oriented decision-making processes could displace dissensus for some time; dissensus would eventually emerge and produce a conflict, when citizens want to transform an undesirable reality.

Democracy empowers people’s voices horizontally; its failure unleashes heated reactions from people who wish to reclaim the power they had when voting (Mouffe, 2000). Social outbursts naturally arise as soon as a failure in the democratic system reveals an injustice (Swyngedouw, 2011a). Conflicts influence urban life through the manifestation of cultural, economic, political, and social forces and can influence the state’s decisions (Appadurai & Holston, 1996).

In the current neoliberal formula of democracy represented in the public space, the state defines a set of rules and regulations to tell the market how to shape the city (Springer, Birch, & MacLeavy, 2016). The city is then shaped accordingly through urban policies. While the New Urban Agenda requires that all countries signing it make compromises to develop deliberative democratic processes when urban design occurs (Alfonsin et al., 2017; Huchzermeyer, 2018; Rodríguez & Sugranyes, 2017), the right to the city appears only as a possibility rather than as a compulsory demand. Nevertheless, the mere mention of such a dissensus manifesto for cities in a mainstream global agreement demonstrates that agonistic urban design may succeed in creating a broader understanding of cities as democratic spaces. However, the New Urban Agenda still excludes neoliberalism from urban development processes.

In the era of neoliberal societies, most of the effects that undermine people’s lives are represented in the city. Neoliberalism is a political system that includes the ideals of democracy but excludes most of the population by allowing a small group of people to retain most of the power, opportunities, and capital in a society (Davies, 2017; Holborow, Block, & Gray, 2013; Kotsko, 2017). These few powerful individuals privatize urban life to increase their profits by extracting value from everyday activities.

Urban development is vital for reproducing neoliberal hegemony (Harvey, 2010); the representation of these processes is reflected by multiscalar phenomena composed of segregating citizens, segmenting each urban area according to its economic value, displacing the powerless, concentrating the powerful, undermining the possibility of most people having a vibrant life, and disregarding the average person’s purchasing capacity. The neoliberal city alienates society in a profit-oriented mode of social relations that hampers the organization of effective collective actions. In part, dissensus in urban design and contested urbanisms is valuable because it thrives among the cracks in the constrictions of neoliberalism while unveiling its fallacies.

Space is a political product that emerges from social relations (Lefebvre, 1977), generating diverse outcomes that produce changes in the organization of urban areas and provide experiences that constitute political identities (Friedmann, 2010). In reviewing the potential political identities of an agonistic democracy, it is seen that the original democratic principles do not coordinate well with the goals of neoliberalism. This gap between the ideal form of democracy and neoliberalism is another reason why urban design has emerged as an agonistic expression, developing spatial practices of resistance against neoliberal hegemony originated in popular power, producing dialectical relations in the public space through contesting against the ruling ideology.

As a provocation to imagining these possibilities, the free market urban products of neoliberalism must be contested by socio-spatial outcomes from urban design as a form of agonistic democratic expression. Defining the mode of production of these socio-spatial outcomes for contestation requires a political standpoint starting from a disciplinary reflection of urban design as a political practice. Three key strategies to achieve this have already been articulated by Mustafa Dikeç and Liette Gilbert (2002):

To achieve these changes, various groups of people must create a sense of mutual benefit among themselves. Doing so will enable these groups to deal with conflict when disputes arise (Friedmann, 2010), especially those pertaining to the balance of power. The scarce visual reflections that invite imagery of a future of the city without neoliberalism offer a chance to explore new approaches (e.g., the ideas presented in this article) to be introduced to urban design, to construct a collective and agonistic idea of a democratic city based on dissensus, to design its spaces, and to think on how to inhabit this city and propose principles that may lead to reimagining the future of the built environment in a postneoliberal society.

Practices of Urban Design for Dissensual Democratic Cities

To illustrate the potential contribution of urban design to this discussion and to elaborate the possibilities of a society that works in a spatially represented political project of agonistic democracy, three forms of spatial dissent will be explored presently. These three examples were selected to cover three different approaches to the way in which agonism may be read in cities: from social movements doing heterocronic contestations on space and from a community-led design process over private property and artistic expressions for changing the meaning of spaces. In three different samples—mass, neighborhood, and art—the relationship between urban design and dissensual democracy is reviewed under the scope of a potential agonistic, democratic resignification of space. Therefore, it is suggested that the main contribution of urban design to an agonistic democracy is made through operative actions in the process of shaping the space. These operative actions contest the usual consensual rules that shape the city (as part of regulatory frameworks, market rules, and planning policies) to provoke a new interpretation of space and rethink the way in which the city delivers messages and is inhabited. As activators of the public space, these examples of dissensual practices work as reflective sources toward producing a series of principles for advancing toward an agenda of urban design for agonistic democracy.

Amos Rapoport and Sabine El Sayegh (2005) state that the spatial features of a city determine the behavior of its inhabitants. These features can be physiological, anatomic, or perceptual, and they are confirmed by meanings that people assign to a city’s public spaces. The meanings of spaces are influenced by images, ideals, status, identity, and culture, all of which are qualities that people remember from these spaces. The relationship between social practices and urban form is complex because it is composed of and shaped by the inhabitants’ experiences within the built environment. As such, the democratic city as a collective spatial construction is a subject of design that reflects the cultural features of society, which are represented from the mind-set of the social body.

Appropriation is a practice commonly used to democratize the public space. The idea of open-ended projects refers to this topic through design mechanisms that facilitate the customization and adaptability of the environment. However, given that these mechanisms are not yet dominant, appropriation is a tactic of political action with direct spatial representations. “Urban design interventions functioning in this context must thus be responsive and locally grounded activities, with an understanding of scale and strategy, moving out the clear vision of building and architecture as objects of commodity” (Boano et al., 2013, p. 10).

Detaching urban design from the commodification of spaces in the neoliberal context may be a difficult task, but it is already happening without the participation of urban designers. While people are intuitively performing these contested spatial practices based on everyday experiences, political demands, and social issues in cities, the disciplinary field of urban design remains observant, though not yet actively involved. The contribution of urban designers in the production of contested urban practices could be important in developing a theoretically grounded dissensus design for an agonistic democratic expression, which could be brought forward in the discipline of people’s reflections and questions about the representativeness of the political system.

The diverse intuitive processes of urban design as dissensus are ongoing around the world. These spatial practices offer rich examples that can be used for inductively theorizing the potentials of an urban design practice that promotes agonistic democracy. The actions of contesting neoliberal policies through spatial transformations thrive, and beneath these actions lie the evidence needed to imagine the possibilities of designing a democratic city in contrast to a consensus democracy and against neoliberal urbanisms.

Santiago de Chile: The March as a Vote and the Public Space as a Ballot Box

The march is a social manifestation, a contestation against democratic failures. It is composed by the public space in which a crowd gathers to walk through the main areas of a city and interfere with the normal functions of urban life with the intent of delivering a symbolic message. The march provides a more direct representation of people’s voices than voting for politicians in a questionable political system. It is an accepted tactic for contesting contemporary urban life.

Historically, the demand for deeper transformations toward reaching social justice has been given in the streets (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2012). The march is an ephemeral spatial transformation (Vergara-Perucich, 2012); it changes the meaning of the street from a public transit corridor into a political transformation corridor for several hours before returning to its original functions.

In Santiago de Chile, the main street—La Alameda (Figure 1)—has historically been taken over by organized crowds of manifestants who wish to deliver political messages to the authorities (Salazar, 2006). Because La Alameda is the main road of the city, the whole city is affected when a march is in progress. Public transport is diverted, stores close, police surround the area, and people change the use of the space for political purposes. The neoliberal city gets contested, the flux of capital is retarded, and a broader population has the chance to hear the crowd’s message. The authorities cannot deny the contingency for reform and are forced to, at the very least, recognize the reasons for the march.

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Figure 1.

Picture of people marching in Santiago for free education.

A democratic city cannot be immobile. Transformations, adaptations, and spatial reinterpretations occur in democratic cities because dissensus demands openness and flexibility in the way in which space is used. The concept of “heterotopic spaces” (coined by Michel Foucault) is one of the strategies embraced by urban designers. “The heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other” (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986, p. 25). These spaces can have different layers of meanings whose activation depends on how they are used and the will of those who use them.

Complementing the heterotopic condition that appears in marches, heterochrony is an alternative way to understand it. Heterochrony implies that the meaning of the space has a temporality; it lasts for a while and then changes again depending on how it is (re)appropriated. Meaning and time are key components of building the significance of urban spaces from a political perspective. Although these events are ephemeral and the usual condition of La Alameda is functional to the ruling class, such events show people a potential path of action by delivering an already working agonistic strategy as a form of urban design praxis by dissensus. Democratizing the symbolic spaces of cities by changing the power relations represents an opportunity to elaborate a strategy from urban design regarding its political role.

When voting is understood as a meaningless democratic instrument, the street and the marches become spaces where democracy sets its priorities from the perspective of massive groups of people that usually go beyond partisan politics for a particular objective (e.g., climate change, educational opportunities, housing affordability, LGBTI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex] rights, health, pensions).

The ephemeral urban transformation of marches is a claim for new ethics of representativeness and a new order for how democracy is practiced. This claim, though, remains in the realm of small heterochronic events, and it brings a disciplinary challenge to urban design to transcend from its endurance in the public space. Urban design should find connections with other disciplines to transform the contestation in public spaces into political discourses and to then transform these discourses into public policies.

Madrid: Sacrilege Against Worshiped Private Property

La Cebada in Madrid (Figure 2) is a private plot that was transformed into a thrilling public space through its illegal occupation. Initially, the plot was to be a new sport facility, but after a crisis in 2008, this plan was abandoned. Some years later, groups of neighbors opened the gates of the plot and transformed the space, shaping it into a community area for housing public events (Feinberg, 2014). Due to its success, in 2011, the Madrid municipal authority declared that this space would remain under the control of these neighbors. Thus, a collective organization for managing this space created a vibrant plaza that was mostly developed through collaborative contributions (Echarren & Vallvé, 2013).

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Figure 2.

El Campo de la Cebada in Madrid: A private plot that was transformed into a thrilling public space.

A theater, sport facilities, meeting rooms, and a library were created through an informal process that has been called an urban complex regeneration (Nieto, 2015). The architecture studios Basurama, Zuloark, and Todo por la Praxis have been vital to the development of this space. These studios and the people’s awareness of their power to transform the space indicate that this kind of public space, this kind of social practice with insightful outcomes, is possible.

This project shows that the collective design and administration of public spaces does not create chaos. On the contrary, this type of initiative features the community’s control over public facilities by relying on people’s collective capacities instead of centralized authority or private controllers.

La Cebada is valuable not only because of its success but also because of its contagiousness. After the success of La Cebada, similar initiatives appeared in other areas of Madrid. Another community-controlled public space was implemented in Calle del Dr. Fourquet, 24 (Figure 3). This area was a private plot located between tall buildings that was transformed into a green square. This square, named “Esto es una plaza” (this is a plaza), is an example of urban crop-yielding agriculture and of educating children about sustainability.

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Figure 3.

“Esto es una Plaza” in Dr. Fourquet 24, Madrid.

This transformation demonstrated to those living nearby that people can organize themselves to reclaim private spaces for the sake of the community. Because the community engaged in the project, organized its members to take care of the plot, and added value to the neighborhood, the authorities did not evict the community from the plot even though the project defied regulatory plans. People commanded the authorities, and the authorities obeyed. The administration declared the illegality of other urban agriculture projects that took place in Madrid but decided not to evict the occupants or repress these spatial practices.

These examples are triumphs of community-designed public spaces over fixed regulatory frameworks that do not always allow these kinds of emergences. Such events contest traditional urbanisms and serve as vibrant examples of livable urban towns and democratic authorities. Indeed, these examples involve no violence against private ownership. Instead, they involve the creation of the possibility for a future city that is owned and managed by the people in these neighborhoods.

The question, in this case, is how to handle these initiatives on a broader scale (i.e., in a metropolis instead of a small neighborhood). Furthermore, the success of these efforts advances the discussion toward the realm of private property rights over the commons and the pertinence of thinking about the city on a metropolitan scale instead of changing strategies to manage cities according to each city’s size.

Usually, the contestation against private property has been represented by the illegal occupation of land plots for installing housing or by squatting. These cases are different because the installation of private plots in public spaces opens a new set of possibilities in which the common area for public encounters is valorized by a collective deliberation in which urban design occurs while spontaneously chasing a common interest.

London: Performative Actions for Provoking Social Awareness

Henri Lefebvre (1970) invited urban designers to act as catalysts for social transformation by stripping urban disciplines from capitalist goals and discovering a new ethos. In the pursuit of the best methods for achieving this goal, the artistic approach to performative actions in cities provides fundamental insights for advancing from a statement to an actual urban practice that is free of capitalist objectives.

For example, Alfredo Jaar is particularly skilled in producing provocative interventions in public spaces that question the way in which people understand their culture. For example, he built an art gallery in Skoghall, a small Swedish town that wanted to change its identity. Jaar followed the hypothesis that a cultural shock would help redefine the town’s identity, and that was the goal of an art gallery that he presented to the town (Valdés, 2008). The inauguration of the gallery was massive. Many townspeople came to view the gallery, which revealed the importance that the community gave to the possibility of changing their small town. However, Jaar had a hidden plan to use the gallery to shock the town’s citizens: Twenty-four hours after the inauguration of the gallery, he burnt it down. The absence of the space that had been designed to determine the town’s renewed identity was a catalyst rather than a permanent solution. It forced the community to redefine their cultural identity. The loss of a collectively appreciated symbolic space united the townspeople. After the gallery was burnt down, young artists and community leaders demanded the development of new spaces for culture. For Skoghall, having a gallery for only 24 hours revealed the importance of having these kinds of facilities. Thus, this artistic exploration became public policy.

These kinds of interventions employ harmless violence to illuminate the cultural cracks through which people can see the contradictions in a society. This illumination awakens a common concern. These provocations can be triggers for social activation.

Similarly, the Quaker’s initiative was an artistic intervention that expressed an opposition to armed drones. Although it was simple, it was striking. The intervention was based on a drawing of the shadow of an armed drone in the lawn in front of Euston Station, in downtown London (Figure 4). Drones are sent abroad in wars to kill people. The dangerous condition of this method of war is not visible to people living in such large cities, but the people of Damascus, Aleppo, or Mosul are used to seeing the shadows of drones. This artistic intervention aimed to bring that horror to the very center of one of the cities where launches of such attacks are decided.

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Figure 4.

A performative campaign of Quakers opposing armed drones in friend’s house at Euston, London.

The drawing of the silhouette of a killing machine on the ground made people aware of the magnitude of this issue and of the implications of the ideas of defending democracy and bringing justice to people (among others), which can imply widespread destruction and fear. Furthermore, the real-scale size of the drone compelled visitors to visualize the threat that the British parliament was supporting, with a wicked interpretation of democratic defense abroad aimed at creating an illusion of death overshadowing the spectator. The message was clear: Drones are not invisible or harmless; they are real, gigantic, and lethal.

Urban design can catalyze social actions through spatial interventions. The work of Eyal Weizman (2006) has analyzed the violent devices implemented in war from the perspective of urban and architectural design. Melting performative art into urban design may reflect the spatial design, creating messages that violent actions need to be changed. Performative art may catalyze developing urban design strategies that illuminate the cracks and contradictions of everyday crises to produce social change through spatial transformation. Democracy, as an experience, is a cultural and demountable structure, with each of its components holding a meaning. Thus, the fragments of these processes could help people understand what design processes can be produced when space is the subject of democratization. Therefore, urban design practitioners could use these elements to offer spatial reflections of the democratic city.

Ensuring the Political Supremacy of Collectiveness Through Developing Strategic Spaces

The origin of these principles is the relevance that it has regarding people’s ability to alter the normal function of a whole city. In practice, urban design should configure strategic spaces where governmental buildings, financial areas, and urban flows are concentrated. Therefore, if one of these strategic spaces is a square, a massive manifestation in it would radically paralyze the city and produce a compelling statement for increasing the volume of the voice of an organized community that is demanding specific transformations. The public space becomes a ballot box, an amplifier for political contestation with a real capacity to achieve changes given the impact that a crowd can have on a city.

Community Management of Spatial Transformations

Giving the power of defining land use and rent to the organized community requires a change in scale of territorial authorities, from metropolitan areas or districts to neighborhoods, over these issues. Community control over land use will prioritize public spaces over the private property, while the capacity of administrating the rent of urban production will generate communitarian savings for future spatial developments or activities. This is in accordance with other principles based on the idea of the community controlling administration budgets and dissensual democratic design.

Dissensual Democratic Design

The dissensual democratic design embraces the dissensual politics of space. Practitioners, assuming their expertise in urban design, are not obliged to provide solutions but are rather to give provocations to the community, informing them of the diverse approaches that could be applied to shape the city. Then, the people would decide how to build their spaces, not only regarding their form but also regarding modes of production, meaning, and functions. Pragmatism has to be erased from the process, and budget constraints should not interfere with these decisions. Although this last point may be the keystone for discarding this principle, giving the community control over funds for spatial transformations may prevent the reproduction of generic spaces by urban design. Therefore, for the sake of building better cities, this logic needs to be discussed and reframed. Capital interests need to be replaced by the people’s interests. Even when budgets are tight, the creativity of collective design thrives from interesting proposals, as exemplified in La Cebada.

Economic Development on a Neighborhood Scale

This principle pertains to the production of low-scale productive activities and commerce, which would generate incomes that could increase the community budget (Cabannes, 2004; Cabannes & Lipietz, 2018). The scale requires a further study of how many residents can configure a neighborhood in which the decision-making process still is bearable for a dissensual method. The possibility of creating small-scale economic development requires regulation from the central authority in order to avoid competition and eventual gentrification (Inzulza-Contardo, 2012; López-Morales, 2016; Newman & Wyly, 2006). The implementation of this method of urban design should ensure the orientation of urban production as a profitable activity for defining it as a warranty for a high quality of life for everyone. In other words, capital accumulation has to be subjugated to the objectives of these low-scale economies, not the other way around.

Fostering Leisure and Culture in the Public Space

The possibility of encountering the community in the public space is vital, and its design should facilitate these principles. Besides green areas, neighborhoods can incorporate diverse spaces for sports, games, arts, plays, music, and so on, which will also provide more arenas for political dissensus in the city. Although the implementation of these spaces should be adapted to the spatial reality of each city, they should be located in the core of each block. Instead of being specifically thematized, they should be designed as heterotopic squares. Again, the question of scale is fundamental for defining how many of these spaces the community requires. The community budget administration should ensure the constant presence of events.

The agenda’s primary goal is to use urban design to develop a new approach to democratic urban spaces, discussing consensual democracy and installing dissensus as a way to empower grassroots, thus delivering a new urban experience and developing a democracy in which disagreement and contestation are positively valued.