Combining Design and Democracy with James Macdonald-Nelson

Listen to the full episode on Spotify

James Macdonald-Nelson is a landscape architect turned Cities Programme Lead at DemocracyNext, an international nonprofit nonpartisan research and action institute, and a global platform for democratic innovation. In this conversation, James provides examples from around the world to demonstrate how Citizens' Assemblies can strengthen democratic infrastructure. We walk through James' educational and career pathway that led to his current focus on increasing citizen participation in the decision making around transforming and managing the built environment.

Show Links

Democracy Next, https://www.demnext.org/

Six ways to democratise city planning - Enabling thriving and healthy cities https://www.demnext.org/projects/cities

James Macdonald-Nelson on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-macdonald-nelson-745a1b6a

So I Decided can be found online at www.soidecidedpodcast.com and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/soidecidedpodcast/

So I Decided is recorded on Lenapehoking, the traditional homeland of the Lenape people.

TRANSCRIPTION

EH: Hi everyone and welcome back to So I Decided, a podcast about changemakers in landscape architecture and design who are making a positive impact on the world around them. This podcast was created through initial support from the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation.

I'm excited to finally share this next episode with you in which I speak to James McDonald Nelson who is the city's program lead at Democracy Next. I love talking to James because we're both graduates of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at University of Toronto, but his career and story highlights a pathway that's so completely different from mine after having graduated from the same program and also a pathway that as a student or honestly before even having met James wasn't something that I could have seen or imagined a landscape architecture or design background being applied to in such an important and fascinating way.

James after having graduated worked for a few years in traditional design practice and then decided to move to the Netherlands to gain further education and specialty in resilient design approaches and climate adaptation methods. Then after working for a few more years in practice, James had this opportunity to change course and is now applying his design background to help advance citizen participation in decision making around transforming and managing the built environment.

James is working with Democracy Next who are an international nonprofit, nonpartisan research and action institute and a global platform for democratic innovation. Throughout our conversation, James provides great examples from all around the world to demonstrate how citizens assemblies can strengthen democratic infrastructure and help provide more inclusive methods for gathering citizen input for making decisions around city building. And if you want to learn more about what that means, please continue listening. I learned so much throughout this conversation. I'm really excited for you to hear it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And my great thanks to James for being on the podcast and sharing his time with us. I hope you're all doing well and I'm excited for you to hear it.

Here you go.

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EH: Thank you so much, James, for joining me today. Huge pleasure to have you here on the podcast. Would you mind just introducing yourself and speaking a little bit about your background in landscape architecture and then we can get into a little bit more of what you're doing today?

JMN: Sounds good. Hi, so nice to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm joining you from Berlin, but I'm originally from Canada. I grew up in Ontario and so I studied originally out of high school. I studied global development studies. I was really interested in working internationally and wanting to kind of change the world in a lot of ways. I realized recently, I think that was the post 9-11 kind of hangover growing up in that time and feeling like there was change that needed to happen. And so I initially started a degree in global development studies with very good intentions, but very quickly learned that that profession is quite fraught with neocolonialism and all sorts of other issues that after four years made me realize I really don't want to do this actually. I felt too worried more or less to enter that field. But I went back to something that I had thought of in high school, which was architecture because it had this sort of like tangible sort of solutions focused or very kind of practical solutions focused ethos around it. And it's something I had put aside mostly for math grades and physics grades and things like that. But realized I could go into that field. I could study it.

U of T was a great opportunity to do that. So I did join and instead of architecture, I ended up doing landscape architecture, which at the time around the emerging urgency of climate change felt much more apt to join and to study. So yeah, I joined the Masters of Landscape Architecture program at U of T and studied there for three years. And then yeah, slowly worked my way professionally through the field, working in Toronto, working during what is still going on, the massive kind of condo and high rise boom that is happening there and development boom that is happening there in general. So I really worked in that very commercial side of design for a number of years in Toronto, but felt like I wasn't contributing, I guess, to that urgency I sort of felt when I joined the profession originally.

So I thought if I took a step back and a wider view and went back to school and studied hermitism, I could kind of maybe work my way into the field and work more on sort of climate adaptation or environmentally focused design, those kinds of things. So I went to the Netherlands and studied there for two years, mostly working on climate adaptation focused work. So water management, all those kinds of things, something the Netherlands, the Dutch people are really well known for. Studied in Venice during those two years as well. So that was also during 2019 when they had the crazy storms and flooding. I was trying to get home that night that happened. So it was really like all of these things were happening that were just affirming why I was studying this and why I was going into this world. But then the pandemic hit actually in 2020. Yeah, life felt very different as we all know.

And I graduated and then went back to work in 2020. I was very lucky to get a job, very lucky to land somewhere on my feet after all of that and ended up in a landscape architecture office here in Berlin. And yeah, I spent a couple of years kind of doing similar work that I was doing in Toronto and I felt a little stuck again. I was like, hey, this is what I went back to school to change. I really wanted to work on something that I felt like I really cared about that was centered around that urgency we're all sort of feeling. And after two years of that, I felt like I really needed to get away from that and make a change again.

And that's when I had this opportunity to work with a new organization. Somebody I'd known since university had just started called Democracy Next. And she launched it. Claudia Schwalde is her name. She launched it. And I joined in January 2023. So I had been on this journey since then.

EH: Oh, my gosh. Well, that was a lot to ask. There's like a lot to dig into from your experience. And I think a lot of similar feelings that people throughout their careers have experienced probably is witnessing the things that happen in our world that we all, I think, go into this profession, hoping to make an impact on changing and, you know, sometimes feeling kind of disconnected from that a little bit. School is such an incredible way to play and experiment and think through your ideas.

And then you enter the workforce. And it's hard to feel still connected to those original reasons why you may have entered the field. And so I think that feeling is very well understood. And I wonder if just before we talk a little bit about Democracy Next and everything that's happening in life now, I'm curious if you can speak a little bit about your feelings towards when you eventually did decide to take on another degree after landscape architecture and move to Europe.

What was kind of going on for you at that time? Because whenever I meet a landscape architect or somebody who studied landscape architecture, it's such a point of pride. And I think people who do study landscape architecture are such well-meaning people usually and do have these like bigger global aspirations or reasons why they want to connect into this field. And I do think that there's a lot of great work to be done. But it's a hard thing to then feel like, well, you know, maybe I want to do this a different way.

Maybe I want to take a different path, but I don't want to totally walk away from this thing that I do love so much. And I've spent all this time studying. So I'm curious how you felt at that time and how you thought, how can I blend these experiences moving forward? Or maybe you didn't know.

JMN: I spent so much time during that moment in my life. I guess I was in my mid-20s really trying to feel my way into all of the different things that I wanted to do. I studied landscape architecture because I felt like if I was a designer, then I could be working really on these tangible practical results and stuff. And then, yeah, of course, in university, you really have this feeling of this kind of global view that you're making a difference, that you can work on anything. And landscape architects actually have a lot of the solutions because we're really focused on that bigger picture, but also break down to the minute details.

And yeah, that's all possible. That's definitely all possible. There's many, many offices doing incredible work out there. But there's also many, many offices that are also just trying to make a living, which is totally understandable as well. And straight out of school, it's much easier to find yourself in an office that's doing a lot of that commercial work, which is just as necessary as any other work. But it's not always the most fulfilling as well.

And I remember talking to a landscape architect who is older than me and was working for a different office in Toronto. I was interested in working in that office, and he gave me some really good advice. He communicated to me that he felt like he was always very calm in the profession. He never felt that sense of like, oh, I've got to be working on this, that, or the other thing because he felt like it's a profession that takes decades actually to really build your name, build the experience. I mean, every project is different. Every context is different. Every client is different. So it takes a long time to really build up that portfolio of experience before you become maybe the Zaha Hadid's of this world kind of thing. So it's a profession that you really have to be dedicated to.

But I felt in that moment in 2018, I felt like I wasn't quite doing enough and I wanted to go back and train a bit more. I felt like I really was so focused on this idea of climate adaptation design. I knew the Netherlands was a place that was experienced in that and was the place to study for that. And I just wanted to make a change. I felt like, you know, I'm very comfortable here in Toronto. I'd been there six years at that point. And I felt like if I don't make a change now, if I don't kind of feed this little urge of like wanting to shake things up a bit now, it's going to become much harder as I get older. And I was very lucky to get into a good program at TU Delft. I got funding to be able to do the program as well, which really changed things for me. So I took the opportunity and I went. And yeah, I was really excited to be to be part of this very small class. We were actually only four people in our class because it was intended for post professional kind of students. So people who already had a bit of work experience and a master's already. So it was a pretty small program in that sense. So yeah, my thinking around that was really that I wanted to just expand, expand my horizons, so to say, and learn what I can. And perhaps at that point also work in the Netherlands or in Europe in general, because it felt like there was a little bit more going on there regarding sort of this climate adaptation work and stuff. So so that's what really brought me there and brought me to that moment.

EH: It takes a lot of courage to walk away from a comfortable environment, to walk away from that. I don't mean to say walk away forever, but to take a hiatus and say, you know, I really want to chase this thing that's an itch for me and take my career somewhere that, you know, I'm not sure exactly where it will go. But obviously having the ambition will lead to where it is meant to. And it shows something in you that's very open to new possibilities and sort of that growth mindset, which is just because what you do now as well is like very future thinking and positive thinking and wanting to create something that isn't very traditionally used, although maybe it should be in how we make decisions around public space and how we come together and make better decisions around public spaces for all people, not just decisions made by a smaller group of people. As I understand it. Maybe you could just explain a little bit of what you do now at Democracy Next. We can talk a little bit afterwards about maybe how landscape architecture lends itself to that or blends with it.

But maybe just as a as our baby step into it, who is Democracy Next and what is the general mission of the organization?

JMN: Absolutely. That's a good question. I'll try and give as best an explanation as I can. So our ethos really is that we believe in a just, joyful and collaborative future where everybody has a kind of meaningful power to shape their societies. So we work to really shift who has that power and how we take decisions in government and in institutions of daily life, like workplaces, schools and museums. So as we kind of mentioned maybe briefly before, the main through line of this work is citizens assemblies and we advocate for and design citizens assemblies. And it's also rooted in this kind of belief in three principles as well of a sortition, which is also kind of known as a civic lottery deliberation rather than debate and participation.

We really see those kind of principles as being able to plant those seeds of change that we need in the way that we take most of the important decisions about the future of our societies and communities. Our work really using these principles is to design and implement citizens assemblies across kind of a variety of different institutions, public institutions or private institutions, because we really see the power of those three principles of sortition, deliberation and participation as having the ability to kind of transform how we make decisions in many different spheres.

So I can give just a brief explanation about what a citizens assembly is. I recognize not everybody has heard of them or what they are exactly. Maybe we have an image in our mind of what they are. But yeah, a citizens assembly is essentially a randomly selected group of people. They don't necessarily have to be citizens of the country. We always advocate for that definition of citizen as the wider definition as a person from a specific place. They don't have to hold that passport necessarily. So it's a randomly selected group of citizens who are also broadly representative of the community or the society that they're from. So this happens in two stages through a process called sortition and then stratification. So the first stage is that sometimes tens of thousands of invitations go out to society randomly, completely randomly, and of the people who respond positively to those invitations and say, yes, I'd like to be part of this, they're given a bit of information in the initial invitation.

They say, yes, I want to be part of this. That group of people, a stratification happens so that people are again randomly selected, but controlling for certain things like age and gender and socioeconomic status and maybe things like geography or other relevant data that has to do with the topic that they're going to talk about. So that group of that final group of people come together over a series of a number of months, usually on weekends, sometimes in the evenings for facilitated deliberation. So it's not about giving their opinion or creating an environment of debate, but really facilitating and cultivating an environment of deliberation with the end goal of reaching at least a minimum level of 80% consensus.

So this group of people here are some experts. They hear from people with lived experiences. They learn about the topic at hand because they're given a question or a remit that they have to answer and create recommendations for by the end of the process. So this can be something as far reaching as abortion rights and legislation like they've done in Ireland, for example. They've also done a citizens assembly on same sex marriage legislation before it was legalized. Both of those topics were kind of supported by a citizen assembly's recommendations before they went to change the actual constitution in Ireland. But some of the remits or the questions can be as local as the design kind of guidelines or objectives for a particular community down to maybe parking legislation or parking rules, I should say, not legislation, parking rules in a particular neighborhood. So it can really range in scale and size and impact. But really the idea is that citizens actually get to make those decisions or they at least get to create the recommendations which then a public authority, whether that's a government or municipality, must then respond to and most of the time enact as well. So that's basically to give you an overview of what a citizens assembly is.

To give you some tangible examples, this year we worked with two museums in Germany to run citizens assemblies that were tasked with the question of how to democratize the museum. So this was a way for the two museums to receive recommendations for how to really create museums that are much more open to society. And of course, it's kind of a big question, how do you democratize the museum? But at the end of the day, actually, the recommendations that came through the discussion, through the deliberation, through like hearing from the directors of the museums and everything and understanding how the museums currently function, the citizens came up with some very straightforward ways of democratizing it, which included like longer opening hours in the summer, more seating, ways for people to contribute to future exhibitions, all those kinds of things as a way of trying to actually get more people coming to the museum. Because in a lot of cases, I mean, you have a very kind of typical profile of people that frequent museums on a regular basis. And this was a way of like understanding, okay, what are those little things that we can change to open it and allow other people to come and feel welcome in the museum as well. So that's just to give you a little idea of like what we do.

So we played a role in advising how that citizens assembly should be designed, what the questions should be, how long it should go on for. And we worked as kind of advisors to the museums for running those assembly processes. So that's kind of the action side of our work.

We also have research side and looking at how citizens assemblies have impacts on people's psychology or on possible impact of citizens assemblies on society. There's a whole host of other wider research questions that come out of the work that we do as well. So that's why we really tag ourselves as kind of a research and action institute, both the design and try and embed citizens assemblies and also learn from those experiences and try and share that research and knowledge with the world as well.

EH: So many people probably have not heard about this. There is a little bit of that learning curve just to understand what that is and how it can be beneficial and useful. Maybe just for the likely audience of who might be listening to this, is there maybe just like one more example in addition to urban design guidelines or like how this might play out in a city or over some type of decision making around design that you could walk us through?

JMN: For sure. Yeah. I was saying it is sort of a very big topic to understand and I think the best way to understand it is relate to examples because just to premise this as well, despite it not being a super well-known kind of mechanism or process, it's actually there's tons of evidence over the last 40, 50 years of citizens assemblies being used all over the world, including Canada.

Canada has a lot of examples of citizens assemblies. It's one of the leading countries in creating citizens assemblies.

EH: Wow. I didn't know.

JMN: I didn't know this either. It's really incredible. Most Canadians don't know this actually, but a lot of good examples do come from Canada as well. But in any case, I will give an example that is not in Canada because it's one that I do know a little bit better around kind of urban planning and urban design and it's a recent project as well, a recent example as well.

So in 2023 in Copenhagen, they held a citizens assembly for this new island that they're constructing called Lunetteholm, which is an island that is being constructed for two reasons. One and the most urgent reason is to protect the city from storm surges. Denmark and Copenhagen is very low lying area, much like the Netherlands, so they're very vulnerable to sea level rise and to storm surges. They've had lots of almost catastrophic storm events over the last years that has made them really invest in that kind of climate infrastructure and the sort of hard water infrastructurecor storm water infrastructure as well.

So one of the newer solutions or the newest solutions is to build this new island and also pair it with urban development, much like the Port Lands actually in Toronto, where they're kind of pairing massive urban development with a also massive sort of climate infrastructure project of rerouting the river and everything. So quite a noble goal, quite a progressive sort of project, but there was a lot of public pushback on the urban development part of that project, so much so that there were protests and a lot of criticism from the public that the government and the municipality came together and said, OK, we need to do a citizens assembly here to kind of decide the future of this project.

We need to get people an actual say. We didn't give them a say before we made the decision to green light this, but we will give them a say in shaping the future of it. So they spent the last year or so or last eight months, I guess, with a randomly selected group of citizens from Copenhagen and the wider region to come up with a list of recommendations for how the development of the island and any potential future neighbourhood would look. They've just finished deliberation, I think in the last month or so, and they are now delivering those recommendations to kind of citizen representatives within the municipality. And the municipality will now need to respond in the next month to those recommendations, which will then hopefully have implications for the future of that project itself. I don't know the specifics of the recommendations that they gave, to be honest, but it was a way of trying to kind of transform this previously sort of weak democratic conversation into a much stronger one by actually involving citizens in it.

EH: Right. So what comes to mind is many landscape architects, designers will be familiar with public engagement sessions. And you get together in your community centre and you discuss a design being proposed by a firm or whomever in that forum and it can be a little bit chaotic. Can you speak a little bit to like the difference between those?

JMN: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, this is the question we get the most is because it's because citizen engagement is actually in many places already quite a robust mechanism in some ways to involve people in projects. But as we've seen through many of those engagement processes, they're typically those kind of town hall style, hear your options, choose one, you know, or don't give us your opinion. And they're really designed in a way that they first of all, they bring out the loudest voices in the communities, which are not always representative of the communities themselves. They often take place during times and during or in spaces as well that are not always accessible to everybody. And they don't necessarily kind of cultivate that that essence of deliberation or that process of deliberation. They really cultivate that kind of opinion giving and debate style engagement, which is not always super helpful for making decisions about projects. And that's why I think a lot of the time engagement just has such a bad reputation because we that that is how we often view it, is the people sitting in an audience, people on a stage and yelling back and forth.

And that's, that's just not what we're at what we're advocating for. Citizens assembly is a much deeper sort of form of engagement. People are paid for their time or at least compensated for travel expenses, carrying expenses if they have maybe their folks at home, childcare expenses, those kinds of things. So the barriers that keep a lot of people from joining any sort of typical engagement process are reduced, at least through that kind of compensation, I guess, for their time. They're provided with meals, provided with a space that is accessible to everybody. If it's a national level citizens assembly and people are coming from all parts of the country, flights and airfare are covered and stuff, which I know sounds like a very expensive process. And especially when you have a national level kind of assembly process. And it's true, it can it can actually be quite expensive. But there's also sometimes quite a huge cost to protests and to to delay projects to failed policies, failed designs and approvals that don't go through because there's not enough public support.

So at what point do you have to actually weigh the costs and benefits of running a citizens assembly versus just doing your typical engagement style? So realistically, what we really advocate for is this kind of deeper engagement style through citizens assemblies. But we do also advocate for the kind of wider as well. So we recognize that there are participation strategies that are really valuable. We do need to get the opinion of people from from across the city. It can't just be that representative group of people in a citizens assembly, because it tends to be quite small, especially for municipal level projects can be anywhere between 30 and 50 people, sometimes up to 100 people. As I said, it can be an expensive process. And the more people you have, it does become even more expensive. So there is that kind of need to have the wider participation strategies feed it into the assembly process itself so that maybe the results of a survey or the results of a design workshop from community members kind of feeds us like an evidence base for the assembly itself. Right?

EH: No, that's really helpful. So not only in obviously the public realm examples that we're talking about now, but that the citizens assembly examples you gave in Ireland, for example, these are some of the amongst some of the biggest decisions that could be made for a society and will impact so many people.

Once you sort of understand the idea of the citizens assembly that understanding that there are other tools and other ways of gathering that input from from people, it's almost I guess a little bit shocking to imagine that they aren't being used to make those kinds of decisions that will impact as many people's lives as it could and their very fundamental rights. Those are obviously some of the biggest examples that I think is indicative of this being maybe more widely adopted and used and that that being a more integrated part of our lives like the way jury duty might be, you know, it's just like such a typical process that you have your duty. Nobody asks questions, we're going to make an important decision. Do you have maybe just one more example of like, is there anywhere in the world where this is maybe Denmark is one of them, where this is like sort of a very known and typical way of life that that people it's not as like a big of a surprise to them to learn about this.

JMN: A big part of our work as well is also work cities. So over the last eight, nine months or so, we've been working on preparing a paper which kind of dives into how citizens assemblies can be used for making better urban planning decisions, kind of drawing on these examples that I've discussed, but also pushing it in a way to say that it's great that we use citizens is that we have used citizens assemblies for very particular projects and very pointed issues, pointed questions, so to say, but what we really strongly believe in is that kind of systemic approach to assembly because there is this way of using citizens assemblies in a much more systemic kind of embedded way and an ongoing way realistically that's not just for one question, but as actually continually creating questions and setting agendas. So part of our work is to show how that can be done for cities and for urban planning decision making processes. And that's what this paper really is about is kind of setting out six different ways that you can do that and that a city could approach using citizens assemblies kind of in an incremental way, whether it's one off and learning from that experience to then create a more systemic ongoing way or if they've already have experiences with citizens assemblies starting from that, okay, how can we create a more systemic institutionalized kind of form of citizen engagement through assemblies?

So to give you some examples of where that is already happening, Belgium is partly leading the way, it was actually really leading the way in that. In Brussels, they have a permanent citizens assembly on climate, which is an assembly that's been set up to in an ongoing way deal with questions related to climate change, which of course has many overlaps with urban planning decision making, of course, it's a way for citizens and a kind of an ongoing rotating way to be selected, be part of the assembly, answer specific questions about how the city and other region can be adapt or mitigate adapt to climate change or mitigate any sort of effect on furthering climate change. And it's a way for citizens kind of be in an ongoing way part of that conversation and part of creating recommendations. And a key sort of design element of that as well is that citizens also set the agenda for the next cohort that comes through. So once one cohort is done, they set sort of the agenda items for the next cohort that comes through, and then it kind of carries on like that.

Another example is in Paris, Paris also has a permanent citizens assembly at the municipal level dealing with all sorts of issues, usually related to urban planning, of course, or anything related to housing, they've selected a group of people who are going to be doing an assembly on homelessness. And they'll be looking at that topic further. Another assembly is also looking at the greening of the city and how to create more green space within the city. And then a third model, which is also sort of an ongoing is an ongoing model as well is in the German speaking region of Belgium called Ost-Belgium, where they have a regional parliament and the citizens assembly is directly connected to the regional parliament. So this came out of a desire from both sides of the political spectrum in that region to create kind of this ongoing citizen engagement. So they've selected, they do select citizens on a regular basis on an ongoing basis to deal with particular issues related to the region, whether that's health care related issues or housing related issues or the integration of migrants into the region as well. And the recommendations are directly then submitted to the parliament where they must have at least two debates in the parliament on the recommendations before they give a response and before they say, yes, we accept them or there are some we don't accept and some we do accept.

So another example of an ongoing citizens assembly, which has been really inspirational for us as well, is in Colombia in Bogota, where since 2020, they've had an embedded citizens assembly directly linked to the municipal government where they've rotated in and out citizens from all 20 districts, the districts of the city. I think it's a well over 300 citizens who have come in and out of that assembly at this point to give recommendations for the city's 20 year vision, as well as things like land use regulations and all sorts of other sort of public space related issues as well. And it's an example we've been looking at with a lot of admiration as well, because it started during the pandemic and has continued. So it's gone from online to in person.

And it's one of the it's the only example from Latin America of a sort of embedded ongoing version of citizens assemblies. It's happening in other places as well, but more in that ad hoc kind of one off way. So it really shows that there's a possibility not just for these ideas to tick shake in Europe or North America, but also in other parts of the world as well, which are innovating quite a lot in this realm. So those are kind of a couple of examples of ways that citizens assemblies actually do happen on an ongoing basis in certain regions.

EH: Those were really great examples, I think, as well, as you said, of how these citizens assemblies don't just come together for one decision, but can live as part of a society's thinking about issues that can go into many, many, many different facets of it. Like how is there how are we thinking around climate change? Are there some of the biggest issues we have to deliberate regarding that right now? And that can ebb and flow and change. So that was great. Obviously your background as a designer and like design thinking and caring about many of the topics in which the citizens assemblies could be deliberating about and making decisions on makes a ton of sense. But is there any other ways in which design thinking and landscape architecture or designing spaces for citizens assembly has had an impact on the work you're doing now and enabled you to engage with it in other ways?

JMN: Yeah, I think I've had this realization over the last year because, I mean, initially joining this world of deliberative democracy is sort of the field that this all sits within. To me anyways, I feel like really as an outsider coming in as a designer with the only experience within landscape architecture and kind of urbanism, I felt a bit like an outsider at first. It took a minute really to kind of catch up in some ways. But I think that's actually one of the skills that we really develop as designers in practice and in the university as well is to be as adaptable as possible, to learn new things quite quickly from learning software very quickly to learning site conditions and contexts and all different things that inform our design kind of solutions or design proposals. We're really trained to have to learn quickly and to pick up things quite quickly. So I feel like if anything that that really gave me a good base for entering essentially, which is an entirely new career for me.

So I am still learning, I still have plenty to learn. And I don't deny that. And I am really excited to continue this learning journey. I do bring a set of skills and do bring a set of like a knowledge base from my previous career into this. And I'm really learning from the incredible people that are working in this field and the incredible openness of people working within citizens assemblies and deliberative democracy more broadly. I feel like it's a field that has welcomed me in and that I've been able to really learn from quite quickly, which has been really, really great as well. But to also answer your question around the design thinking part of it too, I think that's a big part of it is that a big part of our work, I should say, because we have many examples, as I was saying, there's hundreds or so hundreds of examples or so from the last four decades of citizens assembly being used for all sorts of different issues. And as I just mentioned as well, there's these numerous examples now of kind of embedded or systemic, we use the word institutionalized versions of citizens assemblies. And that is the kind of future that we see.

We see that the ad hoc kind of one off examples are really great. We've learned a lot from them. They can have massive impact. But the real impact is kind of changing that system. How do we involve citizens in a more regular basis? How do we create that kind of civic mindedness that we have tend to, we have lost realistically in the past decades as well. So that is really what we're kind of shooting for is to really create more examples of that systemic approach. And that's where I think that kind of design thinking comes into play because in some ways, design thinking is about how you ideate, how you create new designs based on experimentation and learn from those experiments as well.

And I feel like we're kind of doing that at Democracy Next and we're learning from the examples that have happened in the past and we're about to expand, but we're trying to expand citizens assemblies more broadly into the kind of systemic decision making processes around our cities. So I think the design kind of thinking comes really into play in that sense as well.

EH: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're totally right. But also I feel like maybe the last time we spoke, you talked a little bit about also the ideas around designing spaces for these citizens assemblies to happen.

JMN: Yeah, so the spaces for deliberation is a piece of work we've been developing with our fellow Gustav, who is an architect, and we've kind of been researching around what spaces for citizens assemblies typically look like. Where do they take place? What kind of are the best conditions for running a citizens assembly? We've spoken to practitioners from different parts of the world to understand what conditions they like to work in best. Where have they seen the most success and the best kind of spatial sort of condition for citizens assemblies?

So we're working on a series of papers at the moment that discuss what we kind of learned from those conversations and then start to go into a few design principles for how assemblies could actually be more intentionally designed. At the moment, they often take place in conference centers or hotels or spaces that kind of provide that flexibility, but maybe have no connection to the question at hand or maybe even the space or to the topic realistically. So we're kind of exploring what a space that is really intentionally designed for an assembly could look like, and especially under the circumstances of an assembly that is ongoing and that maybe would take place every few months kind of thing is directly connected to municipal governance or even regional governance. What could that space for that permanent assembly look like?

EH: Right. And that's, I think, a good segue into if you have any thoughts for people who may be listening to this and again want to learn more or get a little bit more engaged or support the work that Democracy Next is doing. Is there a way for them to do that? In addition to maybe some of the resources, is there a way for people to do more if they're feeling inspired?

JMN: We, I mean, we have a lot of stuff online. We have our website, of course, but we also have been developing new resources as well. So we have a guide that came out recently called Assembly in an Assembly Guide. So it's an online tool that is really meant for anybody who wants to run a citizens assembly to really understand what needs to be done to be able to do that. So that goes through the three stages of before, during, and after the assembly. Of course, it's partly intended for governments to understand how they could get an assembly off the ground, but it's really meant to be a learning device or learning tool, sorry, for anybody who's interested in learning more about citizens assemblies and what they can do to actually make that happen. So you can find that resource amongst other papers that we've written and information about the projects that we're working on on our website at demnext.org. And as I mentioned, we just released this paper, Six Ways to Democratize City Planning, which is also available on our website. And for that piece of work, actually, it's not intended to just sit there as a paper, but it also serves as kind of a basis for collaborations that we want to take on in the next year as well. So we have the ability or we have the desire to work with three cities around the world to kind of contextualize and implement the proposals that we've come up with in that paper to use citizens assemblies for urban planning design issues. And that can take different forms depending on the cities that we actually end up working with.

But the paper kind of sits next to this open call for applications for cities or for civil society organizations or even developers who are interested in using this assembly process to make key decisions about maybe a particular project or a particular urban policy or maybe vision for the city, the 20-year vision or 10-year vision that cities often have to really experiment and try using a citizens assembly for that process. So we can learn from that and hopefully then lead to that kind of more systemic change as well to learn the kind of positive parts of it and understand then how it could be embedded more systematically or in an ongoing way.

EH: Fantastic. Do you have any thoughts to designers out there or landscape architects who may be doing a similar career exploration or are feeling pulled in a direction that they're not sure how to make sense of yet with their current training or people who may be interested in landscape architecture but have a current career in a different area and are looking to blend those experiences somehow? Do you have any thoughts for somebody who may be in a position like that right now?

JMN: My advice to anyone who's working as a designer, whether they're one or two years in or many years in, if they're feeling that sense that they're not working in a way that is sitting right with them, that they've got to take that chance. They've got to kind of take that risk. It's hard to take that risk. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to change country and to start a new degree and find a job during a pandemic, which was unforeseeable, of course, or unpredictable, of course. I think it's always kind of worth that risk. You never know what's going to come out of it. If you have that urge or that pull to try something different, if you have a mindset that what you're doing is just not contributing enough or you're not satisfied enough, you have to make that change. Life goes by really fast, really, really fast. I've been over here five years now and I can't believe it's been five years. It's happened super fast. I really felt like I needed that change and I got very fortunate to be able to join Democracy Next and combine that kind of desire for civic change and working with people with my passion for design thinking and designing processes rather than designing spaces or places. But I think there's really a need to tap into that feeling if you have it, not to be afraid to do it.

If you're somebody who hasn't worked in landscape architecture or is thinking about joining landscape architecture or design, I also say go for it. In my cohort at U of T, we had people who already had careers in documentary filmmaking and all sorts of other things, 10 plus years of careers and they really felt like they needed to change. I know that they're very happy with that change in direction that they've taken as well.

I think really if you have any desire to do something different than what you're doing right now, just do it. You only live once and I don't know, life can be short sometimes. I think it's really important to just go for it. I'm happy that I did and it wasn't always easy, but it was definitely worth it.

EH: That's so true. A great note to leave off on. Thank you so much.

JMN: Thank you, Elspeth. It's been a pleasure.