We Need Institutions to Be Free
The government cannot and should not predict and dictate everything that happens in a city. However, societies need to build capacities for people, businesses, and civil society in a sufficiently predictable and reliable manner. Tackling that dilemma is why I am proudly a bureaucrat.
In January 2022, I switched from running a big public sector organization to research. My research looks at the skills and practices local governments need for partnerships for parks and libraries.
Being a fellow in a prestigious research university has truly demonstrated that doing research is a completely different job than being an executive in a public institution. Not easier or more difficult. Simply different.
I have been in awe of the willingness of many experienced researchers to advise me on this journey. My brilliant colleagues Francisca Rojas and Leigh Graham have encouraged me to hold on to my own voice as a practitioner and a former journalist.
Professor of Geography Pia Bäcklund from the University of Helsinki has been generous in commenting on research plans, linking me to articles, and encouraging me to build on my experience in cities. She has written extensively on planning and participation practices in land use — a theme highly relevant to my research on public spaces. On our most recent call, she encouraged me to go and sit outside without my laptop and write out my worldview in a notebook. She encouraged me to write down the principal ideas that guide the way I approach my research data and references. It would help me in entering a conversation with other authors.
She was correct. I recommend this exercise to everyone in the difficult practice of sense-making. I followed the advice in three acts. First, I took a pen and a notebook and wrote down two pages of notes. Second, after reading the notes, I went for a walk and used voice typing on my phone to capture my thoughts. As the third and last step, I edited those notes into the three themes below.
Capability
The thinkers who have probably influenced the way I look at the world the most are Chicago-based philosopher Martha Nussbaum and Indian Nobel-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. Sen and Nussbaum have created what is called the capability approach.
Sen defines a good life as the capability to live a life one has a reason to value. “Reason to value” is an expression that takes a few readings to digest. It emphasizes agency and choice. Being capable consists of knowing what is possible, having the skills and the rights to make choices, and being able to live out those choices. The notion of having a reason to value emphasizes that in a good life, we make deliberate decisions. A good life is one that feels like our life and no one else’s. Amartya Sen emphasizes freedom as something that has both intrinsic (value in itself) and instrumental value (value towards something). For Sen, freedom is both a goal and a means to that goal.
Martha Nussbaum addresses the notion of capabilities by asking a simple but powerful question: what are people actually able to be and do? Nussbaum advocates for a meaningful life. In Nussbaum’s take on the capability approach, there are certain capabilities — ten to be precise — that society needs to ensure for every individual. These range from being able to live a life of normal length to being able to rest and play.
My main takeaway from their work is that society has a responsibility to ensure sufficient capabilities for every individual. What is a sufficient level of capabilities and how those capabilities are created varies between societies. It is the role of democratic institutions to set those standards and ensure those capabilities through service provision and regulation.
I had the incredible opportunity to interview Nussbaum at a public event in Helsinki in 2016. In our conversation, she emphasized that it is the responsibility of society to persistently keep finding more effective ways to invite people in. But she also stressed that while society has no right to give up on people, people always have the right to opt-out.
The way I understand this related to my research: it is the responsibility of a public library to remove obstacles from use and constantly create better incentives for every person to come to the library, but people do not have the responsibility to visit the library. If people want to netflix and chill after an exhausting day, that does not make them bad people.
My work with children and youth has convinced me that it is society's responsibility to ensure that especially children have a wealth of diverse experiences and contacts with people different from them. Society has the right and responsibility to expose them to diverse worldviews and experiences as part of their basic education and recreation. Especially when it comes to children, a range of experiences should be seen more as a right and a precondition for democracy than merely an opportunity.
Convivência
According to Hannah Arendt, without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. We need a public realm to turn our intentions and ideas into action. A public space is only public if it’s used by different members of the public.
If we are committed to building cities where all people can exercise their capabilities in a free manner, their differences are bound to result in friction, tension, and at times even conflict. The recognition of friction, caused by different choices made by different people, and the fact that we live in a world that is in many ways unjust, means that we need to be able to build public policies that take friction as the starting point for policy design rather than seeing friction as a problem.
This has led me to the notion of convivência. Convivencia is a Portuguese word (or Spanish convivencia) describing the capability to co-exist across differences. The English word ‘conviviality’ carries a slightly lighter, more joyful, even bourgeoisie undertone and has less recognition of friction. Convivência recognizes friction as a natural part of living with people different from you. One of my Brazilian interviewees described convivência beautifully:
“It’s a skill that we need to develop for us to live with others who are different from us. It’s difficult to teach in a class; you need to practice it. There are places where we can exercise, like public spaces and schools. In order for this to happen, these places need to have a lot of diversity, because the main promoter to develop the skill of convivência is diversity.”
Friction is not in opposition to joy and pleasure. Most new things, most meaningful things, and most learning result from some level of friction. The key thing here is the capability to handle friction in a way that avoids striving for harmony but at the same time the capability to avoid friction escalating into hatred or violence. To do convivência, to conviver, is feeling capable enough to enter the public realm.
Framing convivência as a set of skills rather than an attitude is a call for action for public institutions, like schools, parks, and public libraries. I have been very inspired by the work of Shamser Sinha and Les Back, who have identified five conviviality skills based on ethnographic research with youth in London. I see potential in these five skills functioning as a guiding principle for training public space staff and designing and managing public spaces. The five skills are:
1. Fostering attentiveness and curiosity to the life of multiculture.
2. Care for the city and the capacity to put yourself in another’s place.
3. Worldliness and making connections beyond local confines.
4. Developing an aversion to the pleasures of hating and laying blame at the door of the new stranger and the next in line.
5. Making connections and building a home in a landscape of division and social damage.
Institutions
I am a believer in the importance of bureaucracy and institutionalized practices as preconditions for equity and prosperity. We need well-functioning institutions to be free. But I also recognize that the ideal of bureaucrats as guardians of good governance does not mean that everything should stay the same, that all government practices would be great, or that everyone in government would be doing an excellent job.
The fact that civil servants or politicians hold and use power is not a terrible thing. The recognition of power is also a recognition that even when dialogue is a powerful tool for building understanding and trust, it is not the best method for making decisions and holding people accountable. It is part of the process, not the process. A fundamental precondition in democratic governance is that public authorities exercise that power according to laws and regulations, are committed to dialogue, publicly explain the reasons for their decisions, and that there are checks and balances for civil servants and elected leaders.
The more I work with questions of equity and sustainability, the more I am convinced that the responsibility of public institutions cannot be reduced to asking people what they want and then measuring customer satisfaction. Asking people what they want and working with the community on defining challenges and testing out approaches, even giving tools for the community to take a lead in solving problems, is important. Seeing the role of institutions and their staff more as guardians or stewards means that the institution does not have the right to decide or design the use of our commons without public engagement and institutionalized practices to share power. But it also means pushing the community not only to discuss what each member wants but also what would be the right thing to do. But it also means that the role of the guardian or steward obliges the government to broaden its scope from hearing the needs of current residents to the world of nature, to legacy and heritage, and the needs of the future. One of the main challenges for tomorrow’s governance and giving these other interests a seat at the table
One of the main challenges in the governance of urban commons seems to be developing institutional practices that build public trust and still have a sufficient level of flexibility and speed. We have too much rigidity in some places and too much improvisation in others. Government practices need to be revised to the world of governance, the world of partnerships, and the world of collaboration.
Charles Landry and others have called this creative bureaucracy. Rainer Kattel and others call this the need for agile stability. The unpredictability of today’s cities requires accepting that everything should not and cannot be predicted. At the same time, people, businesses, and civil society in cities require sufficiently predictable living conditions and rights to be able to plan their lives and actions.
None of this can be done without functioning institutions. That is why I proudly call myself a bureaucrat. A creative one.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.
Back, L. & Sinha, S. (2016). Multicultural conviviality in the midst of racism’s ruins. Journal of Intercultural Studies. 2016 Sep 02; 37(5) 517–532 DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2016.1211625
Foster, S. & Iaione, C. (2022). Co-Cities. Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities. MIT Press.
Illich, I. (1974). Tools for Conviviality. Marion Boyars.
Kattel, R., Drechsler, W. and Karo, E. (2022). How to Make an Entrepreneurial State. Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy. Yale University Press.
Landry, C.: Creative Bureaucracy Manifesto. https://creativebureaucracy.org/about/manifesto/
Nussbaum, M.C. (2011). Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
Wise, A. & Noble, G. (2016). Convivialities: An Orientation. Journal of Intercultural Studies. 37:5, 423–431.
