Jonas Staal shares experiences on assemblies and internationalism contesting imperialist propaganda. Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit...

Oana Bogdan and Olaf Grawert discuss about the possible ways of political commitment in architecture. They share ideas and professional experiences confronting the rhetoric of conventional politics that keep citizens away from the debate and from the design and construction of the city. Oana Bogdan is a Belgium-Romanian architect. She founded the architectural firm Bogdan & Van Broeck, now reconfigured as &Bogdan which stands for cooperation. Her problem-solving mentality and...

Claudia Chwalisz talks about deliberation, new democratic models, and commitment as a form of participation. Claudia Chwalisz is the Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext. Prior to that, Claudia served as the Innovative Citizen Participation Lead at the OECD, where she established and analysed around 600 examples of deliberative assemblies around the world, co-authored the "Catching the Deliberative Wave" report, and set standards for implementation and institutionalisation. She was involved in...

Giovanna Borasi talks about the agency of architecture culture institutions, contemporary social concerns, scales, and the public. Giovanna Borasi is an architect, editor, and curator. She has been Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) since January 2020. Borasi’s work explores alternative ways of practicing and evaluating architecture, considering the impact of contemporary environmental, political, and social issues on the construction of the built...

Keller Easterling talks about the medium of action for design, its interplays, and how to exploit problems instead of trying to fix them. Keller Easterling is a designer, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. Her books include, Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space:...

Gabu Heindl talks about activist practices, radical democracy, spatial policies, and the political dimension of planning. Gabu Heindl  is an architect, urbanist and activist; her Vienna based practice GABU Heindl Architektur focuses on public space, collective housing and urban justice. Gabu Heindl holds a postgraduate masters in Architecture and Urbanism from Princeton University and wrote her PhD on radical democracy in architecture and urban planning at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna....

Finn Williams talks about architecture public practices and the role of local government in managing inclusive everyday places. Finn Williams is City Architect Malmø in Sweden. He is Co-founder of Public Practice, the social enterprise which is transforming the status of public service in the built environment sector. He previously worked for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Croydon Council and the Greater London Authority. He is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Innovation...

Albena Yaneva discusses architectural ethnography and its importance behind the scenes of the architectural production.  Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG). She is the author of multiple monographs including Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) and Latour for Architects (Routledge, 2022).

Dennis Pohl architecture historian and researcher, discusses how architectural space both reflects and shapes institutions. Pohl is a postdoctoral researcher at Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture at TU Delft, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He is guest-editor of the ARCH+ issue "Europe: Infrastructures of Externalization," and the ATR issue "The Architecture of Global Governance."

Rahel Süß discusses citizens' assembly, democracy and provocation, and spaces deliberate democracy necessitates. Rahel Süß is a political theorist and a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the founding director of the Data Politics Lab (Humboldt-University of Berlin) and the founder of the journal engagée.

Clémentine Deliss curator, cultural historian, and publisher discusses a Metabolic institution and the possibility of neighbourhood museums. In her role as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Associate Curator of KW Berlin and Guest Professor at the Academy of Arts, Hamburg, she focuses on transdisciplinary and transcultural exchanges.