Reassembling Public Administration: Participation and InnovationMarkus Miessen, Julio Paulos
INPUT MARKUS MIESSEN
The Esch Clinics – In times marked by speed and extreme polarisation, Cultures of Assembly works as a platform for democratic experimentation, spatial justice, and inclusive urban regeneration. The Esch Clinics project was kicked off in Luxembourg in 2024, exploring democratic models of urban governance and the care of urban commons. Mobilizing international guest research residents working with local agents and communities, The Esch Clinics develops policy proposals that ensure a more heterogeneous approach for shaping the city’s future. The project promotes debate through a series of public discursive formats that assemble citizen, researchers, local actors, and politicians to address vital urban themes such as low-threshold design, non-normative use of public space, care for the commons, native knowledges, and civic advocacy. A key development in 2023/24 was the strategic partnership with DemocracyNext, an international, non-partisan research and action lab en route to establishing Luxembourg’s first permanent Citizens’ Assembly, leveraging sortition and deliberation to address local issues and aspirations – while pushing for what we call Agonistic Assemblies.
INPUT JULIO PAULOS
The European city serves as a material support for political strategies. This lecture examines how urban politics in what is generically termed the European city materialises through performative acts alongside bureaucratic policy innovations. Based on a multi-site ethnography conducted in Lisbon, Vienna, and Zurich, it explores how expertise and policy are consolidated through rituals and speech acts that invoke economic, environmental, and legal innovation. These practices produce hybrid actions that blur the boundaries between technical, institutional, and public domains.
The lecture analyses these shifts through emerging formats of performing the city—forums, living labs, inaugurations, exhibitions, award ceremonies, and best-casing exercises—which render political agency visible in novel ways. Performativity, in this context, is employed as a lens to reconsider how political agency unfolds: not through grand confrontations, but through subtle, yet consequential, enactments. Rather than framing urban politics as either post-democratic governance or radical contestation, the lecture argues that performativity offers a more nuanced understanding of the city as a space where political agency is continuously invoked, negotiated, and reconfigured.
CV:
Markus Miessen is an architect (studiomiessen.com), writer, and Professor of Urban Regeneration at UniLu, where he holds the Chair of the City of Esch (culturesofassembly.org). Miessen has previously taught at the AA, The Berlage, Städelschule, USC LA, and has been a Harvard Fellow. His work revolves around questions of critical spatial practice, institution building, and spatial politics. As a spatial consultant, he currently works with The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. Amongst many other books and writings, Miessen is the author of “The Nightmare of Participation”, “Crossbenching”, and editor of “Agonistic Assemblies”. Since 2024, he is also part of the Dean’s Visiting Faculty at Columbia GSAPP, NY.
Dr Julio Paulos is an interdisciplinary urban scholar whose research explores the intersection of expertise, knowledge politics, and urban transformations. At the Future Cities Lab, he cultivates research initiatives focused on shaping a cohesive vision for knowledge production in a rapidly urbanising world. With a background in human geography and cultural anthropology, Julio examines the relationship between knowledge production and political agency in urban contexts.
