Spaces for deliberation

The deliberative-democracy field obsesses over the design of the process and almost never over the room. Yet over 700 assemblies have been held in borrowed council chambers, hotel function rooms, and conference centres, very few of them built for the job. A 2025 DemocracyNext paper by Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen and James MacDonald-Nelson, both trained architects, is one of the first attempts to take the physical space of citizens’ assemblies seriously. They interviewed researchers, conveners and facilitators across six countries and distilled what good practitioners already do intuitively into eight spatial qualities.

Why the room matters

Practitioners are thoughtful about space, but the practical requirements (cost, availability, a venue that can be locked down for days) routinely win out over qualities like atmosphere or symbolic value when the two can’t both be had. The result is a familiar set of compromises: parliament chambers that lend legitimacy but have fixed, theatre-style seating; historic buildings that feel welcoming but can’t control acoustics or light; conference centres that flex perfectly but feel placeless. The paper’s argument is simply that these trade-offs deserve critical attention, because what the room allows shapes what the assembly can do.

The eight qualities

1. Light — both natural and adjustable artificial light, controllable not just by facilitators but by members themselves, over a long working day.
2. Acoustics — adjustable sound, achieved through materials (perforated panels, wood, textiles) as much as through microphones, so people can both hear the whole room and talk privately in small groups.
3. Additional, proximate spaces — rooms close at hand for breakout groups, breaks, casual conversation and quiet, not one hall asked to do everything.
4. A culturally and socially anchored place — the trade-off between symbolic anchors that signal importance (a parliament) and anchoring in the everyday life of the people taking part. Co-creating the space is one way to hold both.
5. Accessible location and navigation — reachable by public transport at the city or regional scale, and barrier-free for every member once inside.
6. A formal yet welcoming atmosphere — material and decorative choices that make a space both dignified and comfortable; the Danish practitioners’ “people’s living room,” balancing institutional weight with hygge.
7. Flexibility of furniture and equipment — movable, rearrangeable furniture. Australia’s MosaicLab goes furthest, using only chairs in a close circle and no tables at all, to build intimacy and presence.
8. Thoughtful integration of technology — where recording or AI analysis is used (as in MIT’s student assemblies), designing the space so members encounter the technology, understand how their data will be used, and can trust it before they enter the deliberation proper.

From rooms to a politics of space

Two reframes push the idea further. The Danish practitioner Johan Galster (We Do Democracy) describes moving between spaces: a formal city-hall opening where a mayor empowers members, an informal “living room” for the deliberation itself, then back to the chamber to hand over recommendations, so no single room has to carry every function. And the Colombian practitioner Felipe Rey (DemoLab), who ran some of Latin America’s first random-selection deliberations, argues the paper opens “less spaces for power and more spaces for service” in democracy: if assembly members sometimes speak in the name of the public, we are designing for representative deliberation, which raises new questions about visibility, communication with decision-makers, and dedicated places for politicians to come and listen. The caution he adds is against artificiality: keep some resemblance to the messy reality the participants actually live in.

This is the spatial companion to running an assembly well and to the broader project of institutionalising deliberation — and a reminder that, like adapting libraries or community centres, it is often about reusing what is already there rather than building anew.

Sources

• Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen & James MacDonald-Nelson, Spaces for deliberation: Eight spatial qualities for designing deliberative assemblies — DemocracyNext, 2025: demnext.org
• Paper launch event (with Johan Galster, Felipe Rey, and Sarah Yaffe), 2025: youtube.com/watch?v=2D4gHP5nsgk