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A DEMOCRATIC INFRASTRUCTURE

How can we create the conditions that make the

existence of project-centred democracy more

probable? How can we bring the group actions

of active citizens and the practices of represen-
tative democracy together so they support each

other? How can a ‘democratic infrastructure’ be

produced for project-centred democracy?

The experience of mature social innovation
enables us to answer these questions too: the
infrastructure of project-centred democracy
corresponds to the existence of an enabling
ecosystem: an infrastructured environment
where a variety of projects can emerge and
thrive [3]. To play this role, this enabling
ecosystem must include various elements, as:
the rules of the democratic game (which make
sure that every project respects the right of the
other projects to exist with equal possibility of
succeeding), the physical and virtual arenas
(where people can meet and decide on their
aims and how to achieve them), the online
services and offline support (which make the
co-designing and co-production activities
more accessible and effective) and the social
commons (such as trust and shared values which,
as we have already seen, are the precondition for
all forms of collaboration).

Aswell as these elements, infrastructure is also
characterized by the way in which it supports the
project activities. This is never in fact neutral; it
always entails a certain orientation. We can refer
tothis characteristic as ‘affordance’: the capacity
of an artefact to invite a certain mode of use. A
way of being that does not force any particular
behaviour, but which makes it more probable
than others. In our case, the ‘affordance’ we are
talking about is the capability of the infrastruc-
ture to orientate the projects it supports, which
means that it invites their designing coalitions
to consider the knowledge and values that are

embedded in the infrastructure (and that are
the knowledge and values that the community
which conceived and created that particular in-
frastructure considered relevant).

It seems to me that the theme of affordance
in democratic infrastructure is of great practical
and theoretical importance. It is also delicate, in
that it is easily misunderstood: how do we rec-
oncile 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? To an-
swer this question we have to keep in mind that
democracy is also a regime capable of learning.
This means that it is capable of accumulating
well-pondered experiences, filtering the best
and embedding them within itself in the form of
shared knowledge and values. This means that
cultivating diversity does not coincide with an
idea of neutrality at all levels. For example, the
idea of democracy we refer to today is not neu-
tral towards human rights, and its infrastructures
should include affordances capable of inviting
us not to act against them. The same should be
true, in the case of project-centred democracy,
for certain basic themes we have been talking
about: collaboration, the interweave of relation-
ships between people and the places they live in,
regeneration of the commons. In short, we can
say that the role of affordance is to connect the
operational level of infrastructure (enabling proj-
ects) with the cultural level (orientating projects).

A SPACE OF POSSIBILITIES

The project-centred democracy uses digital
technologies but clashes with the presently
most diffuse experiments of digital democracy
that very often reduce it to the idea of a direct
democracy online: an idea which, in using the
appeal of digital technology and social media,

proposes a dangerous simplification of reality if
pursued unilaterally, reducing choices relating
tothe public good toa sort of continual plebiscite
in which everyone is invited to express his/
her individual opinion, without the effort of
creating shared opinions and mediating between
different opinions.

In contrast to this drift towards plebiscitary
democracy, project-centred democracy enrich-
es the general idea of democracy with a new
dimension: one which, when added to repre-
sentative democracy, feeds it with meaningful
conversations. It is democracy intended as a
“space of possibilities’ in which the (often long
and difficult) construction of shared ideas and
practices takes place. In turn, precisely because
they emerge through dialogue, and the effort it
involves, these ideas and practices may lead to
results that are more coherent with the irreduc-
ible complexity of the world.

REFERENCES

{1] Manzini, E. Open Letter to the Design Community:
Stand Up For Democracy, 2017. http://www .democracy-de-
sign.org/ |2| Manzini, E. The Politics of Everyday
Life. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. [3] Manzini, E.
Design, When Everybody Designs. An Introduction to
Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press, 2015.