...-HOW DO WE RECONCILE THE ORIENTATION GIVEN BY THE
AFFORDANCE OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE, WITH THE FACT

THAT DEMOCRACY IS, BY DEFINITION, THE REGIME WHERE
AUTONOMY AND DIVERSITY OF OPINIONS ARE CULTIVATED?

achieve it. It must not only be willing, but also
technically capable and possess the political
power to do what has been decided.

This way of proceeding, which to all intents
and purposes is a designing activity, has the
advantage of obtaining tangible results but,
given a context, it also limits the field in which
this form of participation can operate. However,
this limit is not a fixed one. It depends on
the coalition that can be formed. Coalitions
composed almost entirely of active citizens,
like those that animated the cases I previously
referred to, mainly lead to local-scale initiatives.
On the other hand, coalitions may also include
other actors and therefore other competencies
and powers. When this happens, they may aspire
to developing much wider projects and thus
extend the field in which this participatory model
can take place.

A NEW PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY

Let's imagine society as an interweaving mesh
of networks of people intent on discussing and
making decisions about what to do and doing (or
trying to do) what they have decided. The envi-
ronment in which this is happening may be more
or less favourable, meaning that it may make it
more or less probable that such conversations
take place and that, focusing on the common
interest, they become decisions and then collab-
orative actions. The environment in which all of
this can happen in the best way imaginable is
democracy. More precisely, it is project-centred
democracy, meaning a participatory enabling
ecosystem in which everybody can develop
their projects and achieve their results, in so
far as they do not reduce the possibility of other
people doing the same. On the other hand, since
we cannot design and produce alone, it is also a
democracy that is born out of collaboration and

produces collaboration. In doing soit fosters the
regeneration of a social commons.

In this scenario, project-centred democracy
is therefore an environment that tends to
give everybody the possibility of meeting
and collaborating and, in so doing, to achieve
objectives pursuing interests that are both
individual and collective. In this definition, the
co-existence of these two planes, one personal
and the other collective, is the characterizing
aspect. If the environment were only to provide
favourable conditions for individual projects, it
might appear to offer people greater freedom, but
this would only occur within the limits of what
the system in which they would be operating
were able, and willing to, offer. On the other
hand, as we have seen, an environment that
provides favourable conditions for collaborative
projects gives space to coalitions that have, orcan
assume, the power to carry out their decisions.
In other words, they can themselves build the
conditions by which to accomplish what they
wish to achieve.

Given these characteristics, project-centred
democracy is a form of participatory democracy
that supports, integrates and, hopefully,
collaborates to regenerate other forms of
democracy. It enriches them with ideas and
practices from the new civicism of those who
operate to produce value for themselves and
for the community they belong to. The issue
that arises now is to understand better how all
this can happen, or in other words, how the
relationship between these different forms of
democracy will take shape.

ACTIVE CITIZENS, AND THE OTHERS

We shall start with the following, rather obvious,
consideration: the projects made possible by
project-based democracy are the result of the

actions of groups of citizens who are particularly
sensitive to the issue in question. They are active
citizens who find the time, attention and energy
required to participate. On the other hand, just
because they are so active, these people are
often not representative of the majority. Indeed,
very often, the most interesting and dynamic
experiences of social innovation have been
promoted by small groups of active citizens who,
at the beginning, were not understood by others.
Sometimes, they were even in clear contrast
to the ways of thinking and acting that were
prevalent at that time and in that place.

However, these experiences, or at least the
more successful ones, show us how to overcome
this problem: if the ideas thought up and
enhanced by small groups of citizens are good,
they gradually spread, become more consistent
and are finally democratically discussed and
approved. The neighbourhood gardens, urban
vegetable gardens and organic food projects are
clear examples of how this has in fact happened:
at the beginning these activities were proposed
and carried out only by small, fringe groups of
activists (sometimes even illegally). Then, as we
know, they grew in number and ata certain point,
they have been acknowledged and regularized
by the public administration, which means also
that they have been formally approved by the
organisms of representative democracy.

It follows that in the participatory and enabling
ecosystem we are talking about, a virtuous circle
may develop between groups of active citizens,
who informally generate new ideas, and the
organisms of representative democracy, which
have the authority to approve and institutionalize
them. Thus they are democratically approved
and regulated, becoming part of a more
favourable ecosystem.

zowoama

<~< Oo FDO 0 =mo