For any group—family, community, or nation—to exist, evolve, and endure, every member must take part. The same principle applies to larger ecosystems: territories, often dismissed as too complex.
Treating complexity as a subjective obstacle is a fundamental mistake. Complexity is an inherent property of every set, no matter how sparsely populated. Confronting it is mandatory, a duty even. It also challenges our collective intelligence, urging us to invent new tools.
Co‑creating Public Space
Each individual carries a bundle of inherited, cultivated, converging and diverging tensions. Real‑time choices shape preferences and personal orientations, making us singular and capable of civic engagement. Excluding anyone from that participation breaches core democratic principles.
Civic life inevitably unfolds in public spaces—dynamic, varied meeting places that are, by nature, shared. Sometimes they function peacefully, sometimes they become arenas for personal or corporate claims. Sharing stories becomes essential.
Who should organise the territory, steer its changes, and manage daily governance? The answer should be simple: every resident. In practice, however, public‑space projects are often executed without local consent, sometimes to the detriment of inhabitants. Barriers to territorial data, a missing common language, and opaque decision‑making processes keep citizens on the sidelines.
Technology can help. It can democratise access to information and simplify its use, allowing citizens to join decision‑making loops—directly or indirectly. The priority, therefore, is governing territorial data, not merely deploying gadgets.
The Principle of Participatory Governance
Living on a territory demands constant care, whether occupancy is permanent, temporary, or intermittent. Maintenance and planning usually fall to institutions, municipalities, and their private‑public partners. These bodies hold vast datasets that inform their choices, yet the data are fragmented, incomplete, and siloed. Experts only tap a tiny slice of the information needed for each project.
This narrow view fuels friction, blockage, and sometimes symbolic, economic, or social damage—think NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) movements. In France, over 400 projects have sparked disputes, highlighting the need for a complete overhaul of decision‑making processes. Decisions must stem from a near‑universal conception of information that belongs to everyone and is shared by all.
Citizens possess intimate, lived knowledge of their territory: habits, routes, preferences, and stories. What they lack is a way to transmit and share that knowledge. Turning personal insights into critical data and feeding them into an intelligent systemic model would create a continuously evolving collective narrative—a true engine for responsible action.
SofT‑lab: Highlighting Singularities and Fostering Exchange
Participation goes beyond voting or offering opinions; it means actively shaping reality. We must move past superficial citizen consultations and deliver tools that integrate local know‑how and expertise. Solutions should welcome every contradiction and singularity, allowing them to coexist dynamically and intelligently.
A territory should not become a battleground of opposing visions. It must be a relational space where each person finds a place alongside others, objects, and ideas. Differences are not erased; they are articulated around a shared language and common imagination. Building a harmonious society means turning isolated individuals into a connected, interlinked multitude.
To achieve this, we need a common cartography enriched with photos, narratives, histories, and data—a systemic model that helps everyone better understand their environment. Today many of us live in cities we barely know; they have evolved, yet we still view them through outdated concepts. Restoring a shared territorial story restores full intelligence to its inhabitants, empowers them to embody responsibility, reveals latent potentials, and invites both individual and collective invention.
