DIGITAL AGORA

The Digital Agora is a concept program of a physical + digital space for participatory democracy that responds to the global demand for more participation on the public decision making of cities by integrating specific public policies for instruments of direct democracy, spaces for systematization, synthesis and articulation, and effective technologies to generate a new calibration between representative and direct democracy at the city level. From the creation of the scientific method in the 17th century to today, humankind intensified mastering the knowledge to transform space and energy into technological instruments, resulting in the creation of a new form of space: the digital. Democracy now is in acute need of a new institutional design that integrates public policy, space and technology in the pursuit of the ideal calibration of representative and direct democracy in this new world. The way our societies, economies and democracies work has resulted in the spread of the divided city program all over the globe. A direct translation of inequality and politics into space, this reality demands bringing together activism and institutional roles as well as to redefine architecture’s disciplinary boundaries to create a specific program capable of adapting democracy to the challenges of our time. As there are schools for education and hospitals for health, the Digital Agora is proposed as the central democratic instrument to overcome the predominant divided city program towards progressive cities.