Deep listening and inclusivity: How the citizens’ jury accesses popular wisdom

Parramasala, Parramatta

On pub trivia nights, as everyone knows, the winning team won’t be you and your best mates. You’ll be too similar. The winning team will be a diverse range of people with vastly different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge and skillsets.

The same applies to civic decision-making. It’s not only fairer to include people in the decisions that shape their lives and futures. It also produces a better result.  The best cities – more intricate, more subtle, greener and more interesting - will arise from the broadest possible range of knowledge, cultures, ages (even children!) and life experience.

This is what sets The Better Cities Initiative apart. For us, citizens are not the problem but the solution. They’re not the enemy of good city-making but its life blood. Instead of engaging with them reluctantly, therefore, and marginalising the community at the far end of the planning process, we locate them front and centre, listening in a way that is both deep and wide. This is radically different.

Traditional consultation is almost always either too late or too vague; undertaken either at a point when planning decisions are already made or in a way that generates ineffectual waffle. Either way, nothing changes. The people quickly see that their efforts have no effect and become disenchanted, losing their trust in government. Meanwhile governments also lose trust, seeing that self-selecting community participants are usually the self-interested, aka the ‘squeakiest wheels.’ Any sense of genuine communication evaporates, leaving a stalemate.

Which is why The Better Cities Initiative proposes a radical new way. The Citizen Jury is a way of listening that is new, radical and potentially transformative. Randomly-selected and demographically-balanced, this process will ask people not what they want – after all, everybody wants everything. Rather, we’ll ask people for the best balance between proximity and sprawl, private space and public, green and built space, active transport and arterial roads.

The Citizen Jury is part of a global movement known as ‘the deliberative wave’. Increasingly, randomly selected citizens’ conventions or “mini-publics” are being deployed to drive the key directional change that democracy fails to deliver. On complex in-principle issues that require wisdom and balance – issues as diverse as free speech in Finland, foreign policy in the US and climate change in France – the citizens’ jury or citizens’ assembly can deliver consensual wisdom.

The international not-for-profit Democracy Next notes that, across the world “trust is faltering in all directions” and democracy is weakening because of it. This is especially problematic in city-making. Across the world, cities are facing “similarly dysfunctional systems” for urban decision-making. Increasingly, the Citizens’ Jury is seen as the solution.

In a recent paper entitled  “Six Ways of Democratising City Planning: enabling thriving and healthy cities,” Democracy Next notes that “two main ingredients of a Citizen’s Assembly differentiate it from other forms of participation and enable its effectiveness and legitimacy – these are sortition and deliberation.”

Why are they key? Because they deliver a degree of altruism. Sortition, or random selection, ensures that the jury (typically of 40 or so individuals,) is truly representative of the general populace and not just the self-selecting agitators or “squeaky wheels.” Equally important is the upskilling process known as deliberation, which enables juries to invite input from a vast array of experts and stakeholders. Throughout, they are paid a stipend to cover the time needed - typically 7-8 weeks - for this process to be effective.

In this way, the Citizen Jury could cut through the talk-fest to end the standoff that city planning has become. This would not only rebuild the trust between communities and governments but also transform our neighbourhoods via the liberal application of that rarest but most valuable of qualities, common sense. Let’s do it!

Ramadan Nights, Lakemba