Reimagining London’s Democracy

Earlier this year, NLA launched the ‘Reimagine London’ competition, which was aimed at generating innovative and aspirational ideas to help shape the future of the capital.

Partnering with the Involve Foundation, we entered with our idea to reimagine democracy in London, by creating a network of citizens’ assemblies on the Local Plan process, administered through a new Office for London Democracy based in the old City Hall building. Who better to partner with than the organisation that have been at the forefront of delivering citizens’ assemblies and other participatory and deliberative processes in the UK for almost two decades?

But why Local Plans?

Well, they are crucial to shaping the spaces we call home, but too few citizens know of their existence. To democratise the process, we envisaged each borough convening a citizens’ assembly, supported by the new ‘Office for London Democracy’. Each citizens’ assembly would bring together a randomly selected, demographically representative group of citizens, to deliberate on the key trade-offs associated with local plan making, and then make recommendations that would shape the final Local Plan.

And you might ask, what exactly is this proposed ‘Office for London Democracy’? In our conception, the office would host the secretariat tasked with supporting the Local Plan citizens’ assemblies. It would also host a Museum of Democracy, modelled on the museum at the old Parliament House in Canberra, where people could learn about the history of democracy in London and across the world, the threats it faces, and how they, as citizens, could be more engaged in democracy, including through deliberative processes such as citizens’ assemblies.

We enlisted Samantha Charles to produce two beautiful illustrations of what an assembly, and what the Office of London Democracy might look like. We also produced a short 60 second video about the concept which you can view here.

Despite our best efforts, we did not make the final shortlist for the competition. The competition was fierce and there were some inspiring ideas shortlisted – we wish those still involved all the best as it moves forward!

We would like to thank Marianna Mooney and Emily Tulloh of Involve, as well as Samantha Charles, for helping us put our proposal together and submit an idea that we are all proud of.