I’m investigating the overall theme of why people do not deliberate in the discursive activities that make up the public sphere. In general, designing for a ’deliberatory public sphere’ has been tried numerous times and the interfaces vary depending on the diagnose of why people do not behave ”as we want them to”. The ’error analysis’ was very helpful to imagine the designs and the potential errors of specific implementations.

For example, if the problem of our societal discussions is fake news, namely that wrong things are being published as if they were real news, then the easy way out is a to ban news that are fake. But this is a minefield, because journalists may be wrong without any bad intentions, and we do not want to ban journalists who are in good faith. Another example is the problem of informational polarization, i.e. the problem that people do not follow other news sources than the ones they agree with (and thus polarize into factions), and the easy way out is to force people to watch other types of news. But who are to decide on ’good news’, and how do we ’force’ people to watch it? The error analysis made such an issue harder and harder because the easy and bright solution is far from obvious.

As a last example, our social media esp. Twitter is flooded with bots that may be instrumental in causing fake waves of enthusiasm and trigger herd behavior involving real people. The fix to this problem that interrupts the political conversation is that bots are forbidden. But bots are scripts, and scripts are protected as freedom of speech. So, when prohibiting is not the solution, then what is?

I think that the error analysis helped such a complex problem with targeting all the ’obvious’ solutions. When these solutions come to the fore, they reveal how they may compromise values that we otherwise find are not ones to compromise.

The public sphere is (theoretically) supposed to be a rational and deliberative space where people who share a political community – a city, a region, a nation, … a world? – should come together and discuss issues of common nature. Numerous models of how this is done has been proposed, but what is the problem of non-deliberative public spheres? Do people not deliberate because they do not have to same or equal amounts of information, because they do not trust each other, because they are hostile towards each other, not playing fair? Is it because they only talk to people who agree with themselves or are of the same demographics? Is polarization – to take one example of what is normally perceived as an unhealthy opinion ecosystem – the effect of pure emotion, information deficits, attention deficits, or simply the nature of political conversation?

The problem has often been approached as the lack of information in terms of fixing the problem. But the problem, as the ecosystem map points to, is multifacetted, and many many more (cognition, information processing, psychology to name a few) may be added. Non-deliberative systems are so vast and many-layered that a one-fix design seem to be out of the question. The first step, however, is to map all the potential causes of the compound problem in order to grasp what to do in the first place.

5 core values: Understanding (the complexity of the issue), Insight (to or clarification of non-quantitative experiences of those affected), Fighting ableism (or ’one way of life in cities’), Inclusion, Tolerance.

The issue: In architecture, one of the tasks are to design spaces with certain functionalities that induce certain atmospheres through its spatial frame and social life. Choosing the infrastructure of a space is to embody the space with ideas of what that space should be. It is equivalent to pointing the kind of social life, which is to be lived there, in a certain direction.

Cities are competing with each other to have a high ’livability’ score – that is, being attractive to investments and tourists – which may guide investments in the direction of building cities that are ’lively’ in a specific way: We have seen an architectural as well as a policy-based bias towards to the young and cool population (and mostly towards sports where men are over-represented). The transformation of ‘boring’ or ‘non-utilized’ places into ‘lively’ places are the invisible exclusion of other (uncompetitive/economically uninteresting) groups. Whenever a public space is transformed into a fitness-scape, then older people, people with disabilities or people who simply enjoy tranquility have the risk of being pushed out of their public spaces and into their private ones. ‘Livable’ public spaces in cities then become unlivable for some.

Convening: This convening should be a Furphy Competition/Festival/Slam. A furphy is a story-telling discipline that allows for untruthfulness and absurdity while conveying true and thoughtful thinking. Unlike a poetry-slam which arguably dictates certain forms (and perhaps certain codes of conduct), furphies allow to use any form. Furphies may be funny, sad or serious, play with irony or deep skepticism (therefore, these stories should offer a platform of getting an understanding of the issue (first value)). They offer a valve for many emotions accompanied with the protective distance of fiction. They may present real-world characters with certain agencies within certain story frames that allow for conveying the true absurdities of everyday experience. It is this experience of living in cities where people are excluded that we need (from many perspectives incl. the excluded), and telling untrue true stories is a way to convey such quite non-quantitative information/life-experiences (thus offering insight, second value and fighting ableism, third value).

This event should be held (perhaps several times) in a public park. The best furphies should be published in a freely distributed magazine having high visibility. At this event, there is an audience and storytellers. The audience could rank the best, most thoughtful, or funniest stories. Storytellers should not necessarily be professional speakers, but could be anyone, and high inclusion is encouraged (esp. since everyone is able to tell a sensical nonsense story) (inclusion, fourth value). The premise for the event is the above pitch concerning livable cities. Therefore, it is important to have a broad range of players in on this event: investors, city planners, young people and excluded populations. Esp. the excluded should be able to tell stories (thus offering the fifth value, tolerance, by design). In this way, the communities in concern receive a voice that does not come in the tone of formality vis-à-vis policy procedures.

The side-effects of livable cities

Any direction leaves somebody behind. In architecture, one of the tasks are to design spaces with certain functionalities that induce certain atmospheres through its spatial frame and social life. Choosing the infrastructure of a space is to embody the space with ideas of what that space should be. It is equivalent to pointing the kind of social life, which is to be lived there, in a certain direction.

It is clear that certain functions fit some demographic groups better than others: Public spaces equipped with basketball courts summon young men as they typically find such spaces attractive – there, they can easily convene, socialize and spend their time joyfully. It does not, however, attract older populations. In Copenhagen especially, we have seen an architectural as well as policy-based bias towards to the young, cool and certainly lively population (and mostly towards sports where men are over-represented). Why?

Cities are competing with each other to have a high ’livability’ score – that is, being attractive to investments and tourists – which may guide investments in the direction of building cities that are ’lively’ in a specific way. It is not a problem that public spaces have outdoor fitness spots, ping pong tables or basketball courts, but whenever a public space is transformed into a fitness-scape, then older people, people with disabilities or people who simply enjoy tranquility have the risk of being pushed out of their public spaces and into their private ones. ‘Livable’ public spaces in cities then become unlivable for some.

Is there a way to think about public spaces that is not in the risk of losing their hip functionality while still being inclusive? Three of the four levers of change could work together in solving this problem. At the policy-level, policy-makers could force architects to think about their implicit biases towards certain populations. Architects could design their spaces as in order to create certain norms of inclusion: changing spaces also changes the norms that are created within it, as well as thinking differently about the population who feels invited to that space. Code is a hard one in this regard, because the older population is excluded by code in the first place – so reaching them or changing their behavior or others’ behavior in relation to them by the means of code seem very difficult. At the market level, spaces are transformed by the commercial clientele that is attracted. In public spaces, commercial enterprises like cafés invite people to dwell in those places. Establishing enterprises that invite other populations than offered by the social space in the first place may be a way to transform the general activities and life of that space.

If not deliberation, then what?

The public sphere is (theoretically) supposed to be a rational and deliberative space where people who share a political community – a city, a region, a nation, … a world? – should come together and discuss issues of common nature. Numerous models of how this is done has been proposed, but what is the problem of non-deliberative public spheres? Do people not deliberate because they do not have to same or equal amounts of information, because they do not trust each other, because they are hostile towards each other, not playing fair? Is it because they only talk to people who agree with themselves or are of the same demographics? Is it a compound? Conversely, if anyone agrees, do we then have a public sphere at all? Does the public sphere need disagreement or, last but not least, mistrust, as Pierre Rosanvallon argues in Counter-Democracy? In other words, are polarization – to take one example of what is normally perceived as an unhealthy opinion ecosystem – the effect of pure emotion, information deficits, attention deficits, or simply the nature of political conversation?

The problem has often been approached as the lack of information in terms of fixing the problem via the levers of change: By code, software has been created to track one’s ‘filter bubble’, to break it and hence to be exposed to other forms of news, other political agendas than one’s own. By markets: As the rise of pay-per-read becomes standard in media, apps like inkl (discussed in class) could deliver news from various sources and thus cut across polarized news environments. Customers of such apps could be from all political orientations, so inkl, for example, would be incentivized to provide pieces from various news sources. Given the recent years’ debates about fake news and polarization I think that norms have been instituted throughout society that leads people to check their own bias to a slightly greater degree than before. At least, it was normal before to read one type of newspaper. Now, norms may have changed stating that one must check other news sources in order to escape being polarized or contributing to polarization. By law, in France for example, every voter for the presidential election receives a short magazine-like piece of all the candidates, eligible for election, in order for everyone to have a minimal amount of information. I call this the epistemological reading of the deliberation problem.

Bad news: That experts ever did agree is a longstanding myth, to paraphrase philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in his Foams. If true, the problem of the public sphere does not seem to be the lack of expertise. So, if education, policies, markets or norms – or code! – of becoming more informed does not work at an expert level, then what works? How do we get publics that function in the way we want them to? In a way, the question is how we get political communities to work well.

Perhaps one of the solutions is to diagnose the problem differently and think about the remedies in another way: Is the problem lack of trust in each other? When one is certain that the other party is obstinate, what are the changes for having a political discussion? I think the lack of trust might be related to the epistemological reading in the sense that being exposed to other ways of thinking, to other lives and experiences and to see them as legitimate – that will engender a political conversation in which one trust – without agreeing with – one another.

Thus, the levers of change that were available for the epistemological reading of the problem may also work for the “fiduciary” reading. The idea of diverse information would not be focused on consensus, but rather trust as default when having political discussions. Although far-fetched, another lever of change that may be available for inducing trust across a highly polarized society is to, by law, change the mediascape. When the media is polarized, then its readers/viewers/listeners become that too, and moving towards a strong(er) national broadcast could be an idea. Hannah Arendt pointed out that society is weaved from the narratives and the things, which are in-between us – not from having equal amounts of information. They, not information or knowledge, lead to political action and community. This is backed-up by literature that suggests that the US has an affective rather than an informational polarization. Therefore, projects or infrastructures that reaches across a polarized society may succeed in generating depolarizing norms and induce trust across partisan groups. As trust-expert and professor Kevin Vallier writes, “When different types of people interact more, there tend to be higher levels of trust among them.”

Disabling architecture

One problem within architecture is the consideration for people with disabilities. There are two ways of accommodating people with disabilities: Either one attaches an add-on vehicle (a lift to a staircase, for example) or one integrates the vehicle’s function into the architectural design/space. Special restrooms in a restroom area is another case of such accommodation were the vehicle is integrated into the spatial carvings instead on being an add-on. Vehicles come in different spatial alterations but common to them is that they deviate from “normal” spaces.

The deeper problem is that people with disabilities are already hugely excluded from society, and encountering shared spaces were architectural forms enunciates a special need does not minimize the effects of exclusion (use the back door, use a ramp). Architectural exclusion becomes social exclusion. (It is true and even worse, of course, without vehicles that immediately accommodate certain disabilities leading to a complete exclusion of people with disabilities.)

In order to deal with this problem, architects should strive for joining “special needs” with architectural features that are fully (or nearly) integrated with “common needs”. To paraphrase the Norwegian educationalist and criminologist Nils Christie: If you change the system such that a disability isn’t a disability, then it disappears in that context. The entrance of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from Fenway is an example where the accessibility of persons using wheelchairs is architecturally designed to be almost invisible.

The levers of change that could be used to make a social change for people with disabilities to be welcome would be to – from the perspective of law – have regulations that ensures a seamless integration of multiple functions that accommodate multiple needs regarding entrances, restrooms etc. By code, maps could offer routes that would be sensitive to specific need. As such, one could code different routes with different levels of accessibility, steering outside less cumbersome routes. By changing the overall structure, norms would also change, making what was regarded as a disability beforehand now becomes an (however invisible) ability. Making architects and city-planners aware of design problems on this issue would install norms about thinking more inclusively. I do not think that the market is a lever of change here because there is no market influence, as far as I can see, in this problem.

The problem

Nobody loves when perfectly eatable food gets thrown out – yet almost every business which deals with food does that every day. Obviously, this nagging feeling may cover an array of different stances towards what the core problem is: The pure waste of food, the lack of distribution to people who cannot afford food, over-production, negative effects on the climate, inequality, luxury, carelessness of others, superabundance, … or capitalism? For certain, the full scope of throwing out food is a structural problem that needs to be fixed. Thinking about problem selection, the mere process of selecting what the actual problem is seem extremely hard, if not insurmountable, and requires years of research. Besides, one technical solution may not fix all the causes. So which cause is most important, which is easiest, which is the most effective to solve – they may not be the same. Is it possible – or good? – to fix a symptom of a larger structure and thereby try to at least diminish the effects of it? Could symptom fixing be a way to core structural change?

One solution among many causes

In 2015, some Danes from Copenhagen thought food waste was problematic, and decided to fix it in a way that works with the market forces as a lever of change. They diagnose the problem as having two centers: i) food waste leads to negative effects on the climate due to overproduction and ii) wasted food benefits the bins instead of those in need due to a lack of distribution. The project sought to fix distribution as well as overproduction at the same time. The project is informed by the literature on food waste, thus citing ’food waste’-expert Tristram Stuart, who states that one third of the world’s food is wasted (i.e. 1,3 billion tons every year – enough to feed 3 billion people/10 times the population of the US). So, what did they do?

They made an app called ’Too Good to Go’. The idea is to, in their own words, give ”stores a platform to sell their surplus food” for significantly lower prices. So far, this works surprisingly well. In less than two years, they have 5,000 stores and 3 million people signed up that in sum have ”rescued”, as they call it, 2,5 million meals. What the app did was to offer free visibility to (new) customers and thus increasing revenue of stores. Using a profit-based approach, the app incentivizes stores to sell instead wasting their food just before closing time, and thus utilize the market force as a lever for social change. The app charges a certain percentage of the transactions thus making a profit themselves allowing them to expand their capacities.

The vision of the project is to equal production with consumption, thus stopping a culture of overproduction. However, the project does not avoid overconsumption, and overconsumption may lead to producing more food (a sort of de facto form of overproduction). The app may simply just expand stores’ customer base thus lead to ’fake waste’ being produced that again may lead to producing more goods and thus produce more waste. But this problem is unverified. Another speculative but potentially positive side effect of this project is that it may lead to an increased awareness of food waste thus changing norms on a large scale. As such, food waste awareness may spill-over to other domains rather than being siloed in a business model for stores. Another negative approach to this project is a question: How many poor people do actually benefit from this? The project simply provides a platform for distribution, but does not offer social redistribution from the well-off to other sectors of society. So it seems that the project only focuses on solving one of their two diagnosed problems.

Hey! My name is Joachim and I am a PhD Fellow in Political Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. I’m very excited about visiting Civic Media for the term. In my research, I’m trying to figure out what the public sphere means, what it can or should do. Obviously, the public sphere has always been transformed by technology from printing to digital platforms, and technology has been of core concern to this field at least since philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 1770s tried to capture the fascinating essence of the public sphere: the structures of publication.

In public sphere studies, technology drives social change as well as creating new problems (and opportunities). I’m worried about technology for the problems that it may be used to solve: The fact that solutions are possible do not automatically make them good or desirable solutions. (For example, ’fall detection floors’ for elderly that decrease the need to help/check on them and thus reduce the amount of social interactions elderly people may have during the day.) Sometimes, solutions may just wipe out near-invisible but important aspects of life.

During our first class, I was reminded of an architect – Lars Lerup – who wrote a book called Building the Unfinished. Architecture, is Lerup’s point, is always unfinished because human actions make other interactions possible than the intentions of the architect. My guess is that technology may have this same feature of unfinishedness, and one of the things I am looking forward to in this course is to explore such aspects of technology in terms of driving social change.