May 18, 2020

Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Giovanni Allegretti e Emanuele Leonardi

At a time when European institutions of representative democracy are in crisis and struggle to maintain trust and legitimacy, European cities have been the stage for experiments of democratic innovations and participatory processes where inhabitants are involved by public authorities in decision making processes regarding the production of urban space. The wide-spread diffusion of information and communication technologies enabled new opportunities of interaction between participants, lowered the costs and finally fostered the multiplication and diffusion of those experiments, also thanks to the introduction of collaborative platforms designed specifically to support these processes. At the same time, the cross fertilization be-tween participatory methods and digital technologies introduced new challenges that seri-ously threaten the democratization objectives attributed to democratic innovation practices.

This thesis aims to research the technological conditions to which democratic innovations can become a driver for a substantial renovation of urban democracy, which is intended as the combination of two fundamental rights: the right to participate and take part to urban public sphere and the right to contribute to knowledge production regarding space uses and trans-formations. Consistently, this research focuses i) on the analysis of the technological varia-bles that could influence the selection of participants and the inclusion of weak social groups in decision making process regarding the production of urban space, and ii) on the technolog-ical choices that condition the generation and management of bottom-up spatial knowledge, and the elaboration of alternative proposals and opinions regarding urban transformation.
Overall, the research project is divided in three parts.

The first part focuses on the definition of a theoretical framework that melts the normative dimension of critical urban theory with the empirical approach of critical theories of tech-nology, in order to interpret the relation between the technological choices underlying urban democratic innovations and their outcomes in terms of inclusiveness and capability to mobi-lize bottom up and non-hegemonic spatial knowledge.

The second part tests the research hypothesis and applies theoretical analytical tools to ob-serve and research the case study of the participatory budgeting process held in 2018 in the city of Milan (Italy). Participatory budgeting is a participatory process where inhabitants are involved in decisions regarding public expenditures and the transformation of public spaces of the city. Widely diffused, highly digitized, with a relatively long tradition and with a signifi-cant literature, participatory budgeting is used as a model of urban democratic innovation to be tested through field research, mixing quantitative and qualitative methods.

Finally, the findings of the case study are discussed against the initial research hypothesis and used to propose an innovative interpretative framework of the key technological variables capable to enable effective innovation of urban democracy.

Keywords: Social production of urban space; Democratic innovation; Critical theories of tech-nology; Collaborative platforms; Participatory budgeting