By James MacDonald-Nelson, DemocracyNext
On a hot and rainy evening in June, the School of Cities brought together a panel of four people working on, and experimenting with, new forms of democratic engagement around the world. The panelists, two School of Cities Urbanists-in-Residence – Zahra Ebrahim (CEO & Co-Founder, Monumental Projects) and Daniel Fusca (Manager, Public Consultation, Parks, Forestry & Recreation, City of Toronto) – along with James MacDonald-Nelson (Cities Programme Lead, DemocracyNext) and Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou (Head of Translational Research & Practice, MIT Center for Constructive Communication) and with excellent moderation by Seher Shafiq (Global Community Lead, Mozilla Foundation), came together to talk about how cities and citizens can collaborate to solve our most complex challenges. The discussion revolved around the current state of civil discourse, how we can find common ground and make decisions together through deliberation, and the role that technology can play.
The panel opened with a reminder from Seher that the numbers tell a stark story. Record food bank usage, 80,000 homeless Ontarians, and 60% of Canadians believing their government leaders are lying to them. These statistics paint a picture of our democratic institutions under unprecedented strain. Yet, around the world, democratic innovation is well underway and cities are beginning to reimagine how citizens and governments can work together to tackle our most complex challenges.
This transformation is happening in multiple ways that share a common thread – moving beyond traditional consultation toward genuine engagement and citizen empowerment. From deliberative processes like citizens’ assemblies, to rethinking forums for youth engagement that meets them where they are, to technology-enhanced participation, cities are experimenting with new ways to channel society’s collective intelligence for complex problem-solving.
A key innovation in this space are citizens’ assemblies – what DemocracyNext describes as “brave spaces for creative problem solving” where randomly selected residents can exercise and tap into this collective intelligence, engage with complexity, and work together to find common ground. Citizens’ assemblies are based on three core principles: sortition, which ensures broader representation through random selection; deliberation creates space to weigh evidence and find common ground on complex issues; and rotation builds permanent democratic infrastructure rather than one-off processes – meaning that citizens are rotated into and out of assembly processes. From over 700 assemblies documented globally, most are taking place at the local scale where citizens confront daily challenges around housing, transportation, and environmental planning. In Paris, a permanent Citizens Assembly recently drafted a Citizen Bill in close collaboration with the municipality. This is the first time the Paris City Council took up major legislation written by citizens and passed it directly into law, demonstrating the potential for citizens to move beyond advisory roles to actual policymaking.
While this example demonstrates what can happen when citizens are given power to collaboratively draft legislation, Daniel, from Toronto’s Parks and Recreation department, discussed how sortition-based deliberation can be woven into existing planning processes without wholesale institutional change. Over the past three years, the department has embedded structured citizen engagement directly into capital project workflows, engaging over 250,000 residents through 19+ deliberative processes that treat randomly selected citizens as collaborators rather than consultees. Rather than gathering citizen input that may prove unimplementable, Daniel and his team involve residents in collaborative problem-solving where technical constraints and community desires are negotiated together. The result is higher-quality decisions and greater public buy-in – participants report feeling empowered rather than frustrated by the process.
Yet even as these formal innovations evolve, research reveals a fundamental challenge – the very people we most need to engage often find traditional civic processes inaccessible. Zahra pointed to a recent research project she’s been involved in with young Torontonians aged 18-30. What they’ve found is a generation that is simultaneously “desperate for conversation” and wanting to be a part of dialogue while finding existing consultation formats inaccessible. The findings challenge common assumptions about our younger generation. Young people don’t necessarily trust social media for political information – they rely on conversations with community and family members, then fact-check through informal networks on platforms like Discord and Reddit. From conversations Zahra’s had with youth, it’s clear they want spaces to form opinions rather than simply express them. The challenge isn’t just designing better consultation processes, but recognizing and connecting with the democratic conversations already happening across diverse communities.
Some of the most sophisticated experiments are happening at the intersection of human deliberation and technological innovation. As Dimitra pointed out, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication has developed tools that enhance, rather than replace, face-to-face dialogue. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve created publicly available archives that make deliberation transparent and accessible, allowing broader communities to understand not just what decisions were made, but how citizens worked through complex trade-offs to reach consensus. This begins to address one of the typical challenges in democratic engagement: how to ensure marginalized voices are heard, how to help citizens navigate cognitive complexity, and how to make deliberative processes accountable to wider publics.
The panel’s discussion with the audience also revealed both the promise and the tensions that can arise with deeper and empowered citizen engagement. How do we ensure representation beyond simple demographic categories? How do we build citizens’ capacity to engage with complex information in an era of AI-generated misinformation? How do we balance structured processes with the organic conversations already happening in communities? How do we build trust in decision-makers to power-share with citizens? Rather than treating citizens as antagonists, these innovative approaches recognize people as capable of grappling with complexity and finding general agreement on solutions to collective societal challenges. The goal isn’t perfect consensus, but rather creating conditions where collective intelligence can emerge through structured dialogue across differences.
Audience members chatting with their neighbours to reflect on what was presented before starting a discussion with the panelists
As cities grapple with housing crises, climate adaptation, and social inequality, traditional approaches to public participation are simply not enough – they need to be part of a much bigger shift in power. These innovations suggest a different path – one where democratic engagement becomes more effective at generating solutions to complex urban challenges. Through permanent citizens’ assemblies, embedded deliberation in municipal projects, better youth engagement, and technology-enhanced participation and sense-making, we can begin to imagine what citizen empowerment can actually look like. There is an untapped wisdom that emerges when diverse perspectives engage constructively with complex problems. Ensuring this wisdom has somewhere to land, and actually has impact, can help ensure that our cities and regions are truly reflective of the people that live there. Harnessing it might just be the key to our future democratic prosperity.
