How the cities of Vilnius and Esch-sur-Alzette plan to democratise their urban planning
As part of DemocracyNext’s Cities Programme, we’ve had a chance over the last month to visit two of the cities we’ll be working with—Vilnius, Lithuania and Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg—for some initial meetings and kick-off events.
We’ll be making an official announcement about the full cohort of cities in September, but for newsletter readers, we wanted to share a sneak peek of where we will be working:
In June, Senior Advisor to DemocracyNext Ieva Česnulaitytė and Cities Programme Lead James Macdonald-Nelson visited Vilnius to kick off a 2 year collaboration with the Vilnius City Municipality to design and deliver Lithuania’s first Citizens’ Assembly. Ieva and James met with key people within the municipality including the city’s Chief Architect, Laura Kairiene, and her team of advisors. Beatričė Umbrasaitė, advisor for citizen participation and communication, organised meetings with key people from different departments across the municipality, as well as local academics and NGOs, in order to begin laying the groundwork for the assembly. These conversations have also helped to begin teasing out the specific challenges the city is facing and how a Citizens’ Assembly might be best positioned to tackle them.
In addition, this month Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext Claudia Chwalisz and James visited Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg’s second largest city. There, they met with Mayor Christian Weis, Secretary General Jean-Paul Espen, Leader of the Opposition Steve Faltz, Markus Miessen, Chair of the City of Esch, his colleague César Reyes Najera at the University of Luxembourg, and many other senior civil servants and local politicians to discuss DemocracyNext’s collaboration with the city.
On 1 July, Claudia and James spoke at a public event with these key figures at the Cultures of Assembly space to present and discuss the Citizens’ Assembly that will take place in Esch-sur-Alzette in 2025. The exact issue is still to be decided, but we are in ongoing conversations with the municipality and local civil society organisations to identify it. The city is committed to this being more than a one-off initiative, and a next phase of this collaboration will be to determine the best way to institutionalise Citizens' Assemblies in Esch-sur-Alzette!
For more, see coverage by the magazine e-Flux and in weekly paper Lëtzebuerger Land.
Click here to read the full newsletter