Section I: Introduction
In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement achieved what political theory had too often
ignored: it made democracy visible. Not as an abstract ideal, nor as a formal procedure, but as a
lived and contested practice grounded in ordinary people’s efforts to transform the world around
them. Through sit-ins, mass meetings, freedom schools, and organizing campaigns, the Black
freedom struggle reshaped the moral imagination of a generation and exposed the institutional
limits of liberal democracy. This was not only a movement for rights. It was a movement for
civic reinvention. Payne’s account of the Mississippi movement shows how formation work
undergirded sustained action.
Today, that civic inheritance stands on uncertain ground. Across the political spectrum,
Americans express deep distrust in public institutions, erosion of civic norms, and confusion
about the meaning and practice of democracy itself. A structural weariness is apparent in the
very architecture of civic life. The exhaustion runs deeper than disillusionment. Programs alone
are not a solution.1 Most have stopped trying.
The core problem is architectural. We face a legitimacy crisis not just of government, but of the
civic foundations that undergird it. Our civic infrastructure no longer supports the habits,
relationships, and institutional forms necessary for democratic life.
This article offers a framework for addressing this crisis: what the article calls civic architecture.
Civic architecture refers to the design and construction of durable institutions that embed public
work, collective authorship, and relational power into the fabric of democratic life. It names not
only the structures we inherit, but the ones we must build, such as schools, colleges, associations,
coalitions, media platforms, and governance arenas where people learn to act together across
difference with dignity, imagination, and shared authority. These structures are not simply
physical or bureaucratic. They are civic forms that shape how we see each other, how we solve
problems, and how we create meaning together. They are the scaffolding for democratic life.2
This framework emerges from field-based experimentation at the intersection of democratic
theory and civic practice. I regard my participation in the project as both an honor and a
responsibility. The organization is a university institute charged with carrying forward the legacy
shaped by civil rights luminary – a legacy both historic and unfinished.
1 Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2023,”
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/public-trust-in-government-1958-2023/.
2 Author, “Media Frames in an Era of the Local,” Freedom Schools: A Journal of Democracy and Community 1
(2024): 71–91.

The initiative works to design new civic forms rooted in democratic public philosophy, Black
institutional leadership, and the hard-earned wisdom of those who have built power often from
the margins.
The method, referred to here as ‘democracy schools,’ was developed as a structured approach to
embed democratic authorship within institutional life. The name signals both inheritance and
invention. The approach draws from civil rights organizing, participatory design, and narrative
practice to help communities move from engagement to authorship.
Democracy schools involve building structures where people do not simply have a seat at the
table to show up and speak out. People help shape the public story that determines what is said
about their communities the first place – becoming co-creators of the terms of public life. In this
work, I have come to believe that democracy must be built at the level of institutional form.
Shared public understandings without civic design are not enough.
The civic architecture framework builds on the public work tradition and advances paradigms
like deliberative democracy and community engagement. Traditional paradigms emphasize
participation, dialogue, and empowerment, but often lack a theory of structure: how democratic
agency gets embedded in institutions, stabilized over time, and scaled across settings. As a result,
they tend to treat democracy as a set of activities rather than a built environment. Civic
architecture offers a structural supplement. It shifts the frame from participation in systems to co-
creation of systems. Where deliberation asks us to speak, architecture asks us to build. Where
engagement invites inclusion, architecture insists on authorship.
This shift carries consequences that are both practical and theoretical. In a moment when
authoritarian movements are repurposing institutions for exclusion and control, democracy’s
defense cannot rely on nostalgia or shallow reform. It must offer compelling alternatives – forms
of power that are generative, pluralist, and grounded in collective capacity.
Civic architecture provides a language and logic for that work. It helps us move from resistance
to reconstruction. It does not reject the past but takes responsibility for designing the future. It
demands that we see civic life not only as a sphere of action, but as a field of design.
Civic architecture encourages us to ask: What kinds of institutions produce democratic habits?
What forms of governance sustain moral agency? What collective practices can resist extraction,
cynicism, and despair? These are not new questions, but they require new tools. Civic
architecture is one such tool. It treats structure not as constraint but as possibility. It opens up
space for a different kind of democratic imagination – one that is material, relational, and future-
facing. This echoes Sandel’s concern with the moral limits of liberalism and the erosion of civic
responsibility.
This article proceeds in six parts. Part I introduces the problem of democratic infrastructure,
analyzing the fragmentation and fatigue that mark our civic landscape. Part II articulates the
civic architecture framework and explains its departure from prior approaches. Part III offers a
case study of the organization and the democracy schools method, situating it within a broader
Black institutional tradition. Part IV outlines five theoretical contributions of the framework. Part

V concludes with a call to action for funders, educators, organizers, and theorists to take civic
design seriously. Democracy is not self-executing. It must be built.
This work is not hypothetical. It emerges from real-world experiments in institutional form –
from campus assemblies to coalition convenings, from curriculum redesign to multi-sector
strategy tables. At each stage, we ask how civic identity is formed, how power is structured, and
how voice is legitimated. These are not questions that can be answered by programmatic tweaks.
They require architectural thinking: a willingness to shape the civic environment itself. They
require a commitment to democracy as a lived design challenge, not just a normative aspiration.
The future of democratic life depends not only on what we stand for, but on what we build.
This article speaks to a broad coalition – scholars rethinking democratic theory, organizers
building power in hostile environments, funders seeking structural leverage, and educators
designing institutions of belonging. Each of these actors plays a role in shaping civic
architecture. Every decision about structure, story, and stewardship becomes a building block in
the democratic future. What we construct now will determine who has voice, who has power,
and whether democracy can be rebuilt on deeper foundations.
Section II. The Problem of Democratic Infrastructure
Fracture and Fatigue: The Crisis We Inhabit
Democracy in the United States is not merely polarized. It is fractured, fatigued, and structurally
disoriented. Across every ideological spectrum, Americans express declining trust in institutions,
eroding faith in democratic norms, and confusion about the meaning and practice of citizenship
itself. From school board meetings to the halls of Congress, the performative dimensions of
democracy remain, but the underlying scaffolding – the institutions that cultivate shared
responsibility, moral development, and democratic habit – has weakened. People withdraw not
from apathy but from futility. The channels through which collective agency was once built have
been emptied. According to Pew, trust in public institutions remains near historic lows.
The crisis we face is not just a crisis of trust. It is a crisis of form. The democratic fatigue
diagnosed in polling data and media commentary does not stem from too little civic activity, but
from too much activity in structures that no longer hold meaning. Volunteering, protesting, and
voting can feel hollow when they occur within institutions that offer no real authorship – no
structural capacity to shape outcomes, reframe narratives, or change conditions. Without the
architecture to carry democratic labor across time and scale, civic life becomes episodic,
extractive, and emotionally draining.
This is not simply about institutional failure. It is about architectural failure. We lack frameworks
that can sustain collective agency, pluralist vision, and shared ownership. We live in a civic
environment built for spectatorship rather than stewardship. This condition is not a moral failure.
It is a design problem.
What the Existing Frameworks Can’t Hold

Over the past generation, three dominant frameworks have attempted to carry the work of
democracy in civil society: public culture, civil society, and community-based engagement. Each
has offered language and logic to sustain participation. Each has also encountered structural
limits it could not overcome.
Public culture has given us a vocabulary of shared values, symbols, and moral aspirations. It
helps us narrate the democratic project, elevate the common good, and recognize dignity in the
other. But public culture lacks a design logic. It points toward solidarity but cannot reliably build
it. It relies on media, rhetoric, and ritual to cultivate belonging and is vulnerable to elite capture
and cultural nostalgia. Without institutions to ground it, public culture floats above the economic
and political structures that shape actual power.3
Civil society has emphasized the associational strength of nonprofit organizations, advocacy
coalitions, and intermediary institutions. It has preserved space for dissent, service, and
innovation. But it is not designed for democratic authorship. It is often professionalized,
bureaucratized, or segmented into issue silos. While it enables policy intervention and service
delivery, it rarely offers ordinary people a chance to reimagine the structures of public life. Civil
society operates around democracy rather than within it.4
Community-based engagement brings relational depth and democratic practice to the local level.
It values trust, mutual accountability, and proximity. But it is often short-term, under-resourced,
or marginalized by larger institutional forces. Without structural levers or lasting infrastructure, it
becomes emotionally rich but politically thin. It lifts voice without shifting the ground on which
that voice must stand.
Community organizing emerged as a more muscular version of community-based engagement
than the norm through the work of Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) and
others. Unlike more passive forms of engagement, IAF organizing emphasizes relational power,
disciplined structure, and long-term strategy.
The IAF builds coalitions capable of negotiating with public institutions, shaping policy, and
holding elites accountable. But even these models often stop short of institutional design. They
seek access and leverage, not authorship.
IAF victories have influenced decisions but rarely restructure the decision-making environment
itself. As a result, broad-based organizing reshapes the terms of civic engagement, but not
always the architecture that sustains democratic authorship across generations.5
Ed Chambers, longtime leader of the Industrial Areas Foundation, famously warned that
organizers should build power, not programs. His critique was pointed – too many civic efforts
3 Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2022).
4 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000).
5 Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010).

invest in services, campaigns, or participation schemes that leave underlying structures
untouched. The IAF tradition sought to train leaders, build relationships, and secure institutional
leverage.
But even that model, as practiced, often falls short of the deeper design question: who authors the
institution itself?
Civic architecture takes Chambers’s warning seriously but reframes the challenge. The goal is
not to build programs, or even just power, it is to build institutions capable of carrying
democratic agency across time, scale, and generation.
Power alone does not guarantee authorship. Design determines whether it endures.6
In case of each framework, what is missing is not inspiration or intent but architecture. We need
institutions designed to embed collective authorship in the structures of democratic life.
What’s Missing: Institutional Design and Democratic Authorship
Across public culture, civil society, and community engagement, what is missing is not energy,
vision, or moral aspiration. What is missing is structure. We lack institutions built to carry the
weight of collective authorship – not participation alone, but authorship. Not input into
predetermined decisions, but the capacity to shape the public world at the level of design.
Democracy cannot survive on rituals of inclusion alone. It requires infrastructures that support
shared responsibility and enduring agency. Without such structures, even the most vibrant
movements become episodic. They rise and fade. They mobilize attention but rarely change the
institutional landscape in which people live and act. The gap between moral imagination and
structural form is where democratic possibility dissolves.
We need institutions that do more than listen. We need institutions that are designed to be
shaped, contested, and revised by the people they serve. The idea of authorship means more than
having a seat at the table. It means helping to define what the table is, how it works, and what
kind of future it points toward.
In this sense, civic architecture is not a metaphor. It is a form of public design. It is the deliberate
construction of institutions where people build shared meaning, shared governance, and shared
outcomes. These institutions must be durable enough to hold power and flexible enough to
evolve through democratic struggle. They must be grounded in place but capable of connection
across boundaries.
The absence of such design is not a neutral omission. It is a political vacuum. When we fail to
create civic infrastructure, we leave democratic energy to be captured by institutions that were
never meant to serve it. In this vacuum, people may still act, but their actions do not accumulate.
They do not compound. They do not build.
6 Edward T. Chambers, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Continuum,
2003).

Democracy requires more than energy. It requires form.
A Genealogy of the Gap – From Dewey to Boyte
The idea that democracy must be more than a system of government has long shaped American
civic thought. John Dewey argued that democracy was a way of life – a mode of collective
inquiry, shared experience, and public problem-solving. In his vision, the strength of a
democracy lay not in its procedures but in the everyday practices through which people form
habits of cooperation and judgment. Schools, associations, and local communities were not
peripheral to democracy. They were its foundation.7
Yet Dewey’s democratic imagination remained largely aspirational. He wrote as a philosopher
and educator, not an institutional architect. His vision elevated public life but offered few tools
for designing the structures that could hold it. As a result, much of Dewey’s influence was
cultural and pedagogical. He helped shape generations of civic-minded educators but left open
the question of how democratic agency could be embedded in institutional form.
In the decades that followed, participatory democracy became a rallying cry across civic
movements (see Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory). From the New Left to
public deliberation initiatives, the emphasis shifted from philosophy to practice. Citizens were
invited to join dialogues, share experiences, and contribute to community decision-making. The
idea of engagement became a civic virtue. Public participation was treated as a corrective to
institutional stagnation.
No figure contributed more to this shift from democratic philosophy to practice than Harry
Boyte. Building on Dewey, Boyte reframed civic agency not as dialogue alone, but as public
work – the sustained, visible effort by ordinary people to shape their common life. The concept
of public work resists both consumer politics and elite control and instead centers everyday
citizens as co-creators of democratic society.
Public work marks a generational shift in thinking about civic culture, offering a language of
dignity, productivity, and civic authorship grounded in real labor. What remains in this rich line
of practice democratic philosophy and practice is the question of social structures and
institutions. How does civic agency become embedded in durable forms of democratic
authorship across time, scale, and conflict?
The civic engagement paradigm makes participation visible. What sustains it is now the
question.
The next step in this argument moves from the foundations to the frame. From the moral labor
revealed by public work to the structural design that can hold it.
Section III. From Public Work to Civic Architecture: Designing for Democratic Life
7 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, 1954).

Public work marked a turning point in civic theory and practice. At its heart was a simple claim:
democracy is not merely a set of institutions or procedures – it is the visible labor of people
shaping their shared world. Harry Boyte gave this claim clarity and force. He reframed
citizenship not as voice alone but as work – the real, productive effort of building public things
together. This framework challenged civic minimalism and reintroduced democratic authorship
into the realm of practice.8
Boyte’s intervention arrived at a moment of fragmentation. Civic life was becoming
professionalized and symbolic. Public work restored dignity to action, not in theory but in lived
experience. Yet what public work revealed, civic architecture carries forward. People could be
more than volunteers or clients. They could be builders of public life. This shift helped energize
civic studies, expand participatory models, and give educators and organizers a language for
agency grounded in labor, not access. It remains a foundational contribution.
Yet today’s crisis is not merely one of imagination. It is one of structure. The institutions that
once held civic labor – schools, associations, community centers – have been hollowed out,
segmented, or captured. Civic energy exists, but it too often has nowhere to go. Engagement
becomes event based. Activity does not become authorship. What is missing is not intention – it
is design.
Consider a familiar story. Students at a university form a coalition to expand affordable housing.
They organize, testify, build alliances, and ultimately win policy change. But one year later, the
momentum fades. Key student leaders graduate. The coalition hobbles along for a time before
dissolving. The effort was real, but the structures to carry the work forward were not. The
outcome could not be sustained. The problem here is not commitment. It is the absence of
institutional form.
Defining Democracy
Democracy, as used here, is not a synonym for elections, majority rule, or the procedural
routines of liberal governance. It refers instead to a moral and institutional design tradition that
structures collective life so that ordinary people can share in authorship of the rules,
relationships, and responsibilities that govern them. In this sense, democratic theory names an
argument about form rather than sentiment.9 Republican thinkers from Aristotle to Dewey,
Arendt, and Pettit have emphasized that freedom depends on participation in self-governing
institutions rather than on protection from interference.10 Liberal democracy, by contrast, rests on
four interlocking commitments: individualism, universalism, egalitarianism, and meliorism.11
Civic architecture draws most directly on the last of these, the belief that human institutions are
improvable through design. It also recovers the republican claim that freedom is sustained
through shared stewardship rather than private autonomy alone.
8 Harry C. Boyte, The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society
Press, 2008).
9 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
10 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11 Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2022).

The framework developed here assumes that democracy is pluralist, relational, and meliorist.12 It
affirms equality of moral standing and difference of perspective. It treats disagreement not as
failure but as the raw material of common life. Democratic institutions are the places where that
plurality is organized into durable practice. Civic architecture therefore extends democratic
theory by shifting attention from ideals to the structural conditions that make them livable. It
asks how institutions distribute agency, build capacity for judgment, and align authority with
accountability. The aim is not to replace liberal democracy with some other regime but to
strengthen its civic foundations, to make freedom and equality possible through the intentional
design of shared institutions.
This view is consistent with what authors have described as popular democratic republicanism, a
synthesis of liberal meliorism, democratic participation, and republican ethics that locates
freedom in shared institutional authorship rather than private autonomy.13
From Democratic Foundations to Design Practice
If democracy is understood as a design tradition rather than a fixed procedure, its renewal
depends on those who can translate moral purpose into institutional form. The philosophical
foundations outlined above point toward this practical challenge. The concept of civic
architecture connects the moral argument about democratic authorship to the concrete work of
design. It asks what kinds of structures and professional practices can make shared authorship
possible and enduring. Through this link between philosophy and practice, civic architecture
turns the question of democracy’s meaning into a question of how it is built.
Situating Civic Architecture within Design Discourses
Within the applied design fields, the term civic architecture has recently been used to describe
the physical shaping of public space and the aesthetic of buildings meant to embody collective
identity. Professional associations and public-interest designers define it as the creation of
structures and places that help communities “live together” through openness, accessibility, and
social interaction.14 The Project for Public Spaces, for example, emphasizes co-design processes
that treat residents as collaborators in shaping parks, streets, and civic gathering areas.15 These
practices illustrate an important cultural shift from design as expert service to design as shared
stewardship.
The framework of civic architecture presented here builds on this participatory spirit but extends
it beyond the spatial and aesthetic. It treats institutions themselves – schools, associations,
governing bodies, and coalitions – as civic environments whose design determines how people
live and act together in public. In this sense, civic architecture is not a metaphor borrowed from
building; it is a practical method for constructing the moral and organizational structures that
sustain democratic life. The physical architect designs places for assembly; the civic architect
12 Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); J. G. A. Pocock, The
Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
13 Authors, “Public Philosophy for Anxious Times: Reclaiming Popular Democratic Republicanism,” Freedom
Schools: A Journal of Democracy and Community 3 (2025). (For blind review, use “Author 2025.”)
14 Architecture Maker, “Defining Civic Architecture,” 2023, https://www.architecturemaker.com.
15 Project for Public Spaces, Placemaking, 2021, https://www.pps.org/placemaking.

designs the conditions under which assembly remains possible. Both rely on collaboration and
judgment, yet the latter also requires a theory of agency, power, and authorship.
This distinction clarifies how the approach developed here complements existing design
practices. It aligns with design justice in its insistence on participatory process and equity, while
drawing from the public-work tradition to emphasize that design is itself a form of democratic
labor.16 What results is an integrative framework that links the ethics of co-creation to the
structural design of institutions, translating the principles of participatory architecture into the
realm of democratic governance.
Citizen Professionals and Design Ethics
The work of civic architecture depends on professionals who understand themselves not as
experts standing above a community but as collaborators within it. This professional identity,
often called the citizen professional, describes the capacity of trained practitioners to join
community building and public problem-solving as partners rather than directors. It reframes
professionalism itself as a civic relationship. The citizen professional brings technical skill into
shared moral space, where expertise is exercised with others, not over them.
William J. Doherty and Tai J. Mendenhall describe this principle through the figure of the citizen
therapist, a professional who integrates community problem-solving into clinical work and
practices, in their phrase, “on tap, not on top.”17 Their work captures the moral reorientation that
civic architecture requires. The same ethic guides the design of institutions: architects, educators,
and organizers become co-authors of the systems they help build, using their specialized
knowledge to strengthen the collective capacity for judgment and action. Expertise becomes a
form of partnership, and professional practice becomes a site of democratic learning.
This approach continues the lineage of public work developed by Harry C. Boyte and colleagues,
who argue that democracy depends on professionals who use their expertise to enlarge the
agency of others rather than to manage them.18 In this sense, civic architecture extends the
citizen-professional ethic from individual practice to institutional design. It positions the
professional as a moral and structural intermediary, someone who translates civic purpose into
durable form. Within this frame, professional judgment and democratic judgment converge. Both
are acts of shared authorship, guided by the same question: how can institutions be designed so
that people learn to act together with competence and care? The ethical measure of such design is
the degree to which it distributes power, sustains trust, and builds the capacity of others to
continue the work.
Jeannes Teachers and Rosenwald Schools
The Jeannes Teachers were a network of Black supervising educators who, in the early twentieth
century, worked throughout the rural South helping communities design and sustain their own
16 Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2020).
17 William J. Doherty and Tai J. Mendenhall, Becoming a Citizen Therapist: Integrating Community Problem-
Solving into Your Work as a Healer (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004).
18 Harry C. Boyte, Romi Hübler, and Marie Ström, “On an Equal Plain: Preparing Citizen Professionals,”
Metropolitan Universities Journal (2024).

schools. Funded by the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation and later working in close coordination with
the Rosenwald Fund, these teachers served as civic architects long before the term existed. They
joined pedagogical expertise to community organization, guiding parents, pastors, and students
in the shared work of planning, building, and governing local schools under Jim Crow conditions
that offered little institutional support. Their leadership fused professional competence with
democratic authorship. They did not simply teach within institutions but helped create them.
Through their work, education became a form of public design and moral repair, producing
thousands of schools that embodied the principle of shared responsibility across racial and
economic boundaries.19
The Rosenwald Schools that emerged from this collaboration became more than physical
structures; they were civic infrastructures that carried a moral idea about how freedom is built.
Each school represented a compact between citizens and professionals, between technical skill
and communal purpose. Together, the Jeannes Teachers and Rosenwald Schools demonstrate
that democratic design is not a recent innovation but a deeply rooted practice within the Black
freedom tradition. Their example clarifies the argument of civic architecture: institutions can be
sites of shared authorship when their design invites ordinary people into the work of shaping and
sustaining a common world.
Social Capital and Institutional Design
The civic achievements of the Jeannes Teachers and Rosenwald Schools illustrate what later
theorists would describe as the building of social capital. James Coleman defined social capital
as the capacity for cooperative action embedded in social networks. Pierre Bourdieu expanded
the concept to include the resources and forms of power that accrue through durable
relationships.20 Robert Putnam popularized it as a civic quality of trust and association that
enables democratic performance.21 Each of these interpretations identifies relational bonds as
productive assets, yet all tend to treat those bonds as cultural or behavioral phenomena rather
than as outcomes of institutional design.
Civic architecture extends the idea of social capital by linking it to structural capital – the formal
arrangements through which norms of reciprocity are sustained and transmitted.22 In this view,
social capital does not simply reside in networks; it is shaped by the design of the institutions
that make those networks durable. Schools, churches, cooperatives, and neighborhood
associations are not neutral containers of trust but architectures that organize participation and
distribute authority. When designed with shared authorship in mind, they generate what might be
called democratic capital: the capacity of a community to reproduce the habits, relationships,
and forms of judgment that sustain freedom across time.
19 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988); Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2001).
20 James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94
(Supplement) (1988): S95–S120; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for
the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58.
21 Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993).
22 Janine Nahapiet and Sumantra Ghoshal, “Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage,”
Academy of Management Review 23, no. 2 (1998): 242–66.

By situating social capital within a framework of institutional design, civic architecture moves
the conversation from measuring trust to constructing the conditions that make trust possible. It
reframes the task of democracy from the restoration of civic virtue to the creation of civic
structure – structures capable of carrying collective agency beyond the moment of mobilization.
This shift clarifies the underlying argument of the essay: that democracy is not only lived but
built, and that its endurance depends on the design of institutions strong enough to hold the
moral labor of a plural people.
Tone and Democratic Boundaries
Civic architecture remains within the moral horizon of democracy. It does not substitute design
for politics or institutional structure for collective will. Instead, it treats design as a democratic
act, the means through which freedom, equality, and pluralism acquire enduring form. The
framework assumes conflict, diversity, and partial understanding as natural conditions of public
life. Its aim is not to resolve difference but to build institutions capable of carrying it.
In this respect, civic architecture complements rather than departs from liberal democracy. It
affirms the liberal commitments to equality before the law and the protection of individual
conscience while extending them into the realm of shared authorship.
The work described here is not a call for central planning or ideological unity; it is a call for
institutional imagination, a renewal of the forms through which a free people govern themselves
together. When institutions are designed to hold that labor in common, democracy becomes less
a system to defend than a world to build.
Civic architecture begins with a different question. Not only who participates, but how is
participation sustained, stabilized, and distributed? It treats institutions not as backdrops but as
active civic terrain. It invites practitioners to design systems that do not merely include people
but prepare them to shape outcomes, rules, and relationships. It is not a shift in values. It is a
shift in level – from behavior to form.
This is especially urgent in education. Many campuses host civic initiatives – service days,
deliberative forums, voter registration drives. These activities are meaningful but often
disconnected. They rely on charisma or individual leadership. They rarely transform the
institution itself. Students are encouraged to engage but not invited to co-design. This is the
difference between civic access and civic authorship.23
Civic architecture reorients the purpose of these initiatives. It treats the institution as a site of
design. It challenges leaders to ask whether their structures train people in shared governance –
or simply allow moments of expression. It offers a way to convert energy into form, to make
democracy something people can hold, revise, and pass on.
This shift in practice brings with it a new theory of change. Civic energy is not self-sustaining. It
requires places, processes, and platforms that encode agency over time. Public work made this
23 American Association of Colleges and Universities, “Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement,”
https://www.aacu.org/resources/civic-learning.

energy visible. Civic architecture makes it durable. Together, they offer a civic framework that
can meet the demands of the moment.
This is the work taken up by the democracy schools method introduced in the next section. It
operationalizes civic architecture through repeatable design practices embedded in institutional
life. It builds the scaffolding – curricular, organizational, and strategic – to turn engagement into
authorship. It extends the public work tradition into durable form.
In democratic life, it is not enough to assert values. Those values must be built into institutions.
Civic architecture provides a framework for that task. It is not about rejecting the past. It is about
designing the future. It asks how justice, belonging, and shared power can become real – not
only in culture, but in structure.
Institutions are not just vehicles for service delivery. They are carriers of culture, memory, and
authorship. When people have no role in shaping the institutions they inhabit, democracy
becomes abstract.
Civic architecture insists that design is not neutral. It is political. (see Sasha Costanza-Chock,
Design Justice) To embed democratic agency, institutions must be constructed with care for how
people relate, decide, and grow together over time.
Democracy must be built. And it must be built to last.
Public work remains essential. But without institutional scaffolding, it struggles to accumulate.
Civic architecture names the next horizon. It builds on the agency revealed by public work and
asks what forms are needed to carry that agency forward. Where public work gave language to
democratic labor, civic architecture gives it shape and durability. It treats the institution as an
active participant in civic life, not just a platform for expression, but a field of co-creation. This
is not a departure from Boyte’s tradition. It is its structural continuation.
Too often, public work takes place inside institutions whose structures remain fixed. People
build campaigns, teach workshops, or host events, but the settings in which they labor are not
built to evolve with their agency. They may raise their voice but not rewrite the rules. This leads
to a kind of civic exhaustion: repeated effort without institutional consequence. Civic actors are
asked to adapt but rarely empowered to reconfigure the civic landscape itself. That is not a
failure of commitment, it is a failure of design logic.
The argument now turns from theory to inheritance, from the concept of design to the
communities that have practiced it under pressure.
IV. Black Institutional Leadership and the Democracy Schools Model
The Civic Legacy of Black Institutions
In the absence of inclusion, Black institutions built their own civic foundation. In the face of
exclusion, violence, and legal abandonment, Black communities built schools, churches,

cooperatives, publishing houses, and advocacy networks that did more than survive. They
organized. They educated. They formed character and cultivated agency. These were not
auxiliary or symbolic bodies. They were infrastructure.24
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are perhaps the most concentrated
expression of this civic legacy. Founded to provide education when no other institutions would,
HBCUs did more than confer degrees. They prepared students to navigate and contest unjust
systems. They trained teachers, pastors, lawyers, organizers, and artists who would go on to
shape every major wave of American democratic renewal. HBCUs were sites of refuge,
formation, and strategy. They offered not just knowledge but a public philosophy grounded in
moral courage, mutual responsibility, and institutional stewardship.25
The Black church, too, operated as a form of civic infrastructure. In many communities it was
the only institution that combined space, legitimacy, resources, and collective memory. It was
where people gathered to name injustice, mourn loss, celebrate achievement, and strategize
change. It trained speakers and stewards. It housed organizing campaigns and legal defense
funds. It passed down not only scripture but structure. It taught how to hold a room, run a
meeting, deliver a message, and care for a community. Higginbotham’s work reminds us that
Black religious institutions have long fused theology and civic agency.
These institutions were not perfect. They contended with internal hierarchies and contradictions.
But they carried a civic logic that many mainstream institutions lacked. They treated formation
as essential. They assumed that freedom would require not just protest but practice. Not just
access but preparation. And they understood that democratic agency must be cultivated through
durable forms.
This legacy matters not only for what it produced in the past, but for what it makes possible in
the present. Black institutions offer a blueprint for civic architecture. They show how
communities under pressure can build infrastructure that sustains identity, authorship, and public
leadership across generations. They show that democracy is designed under duress, not born of
ideals. It arises from the institutional labor of people who build when freedom is least assured.
Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House
At Huston-Tillotson University, the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House (Farmer House)
serves as a working model of civic architecture. It is not a program, a center, or a service
provider. It is an institutional design site. The organization does not teach students how to
participate in democracy. It organizes them to become authors of public life – not through
simulation, but through real institutional work. For example, in one instance, students co-
developed a legislative agenda in collaboration with faculty and community partners. They
identified political openings, drafted policy language, and testified at hearings alongside
seasoned organizers. Their role was not symbolic. It was structural. They were shaping the civic
terrain from within.
24 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–
1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
25 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988).

The Farmer House was founded in the tradition of Black civic institutions. It draws on the moral
authority of the civil rights movement, the pedagogical lineage of freedom schools, and the
institutional imagination of HBCUs. But it also represents a next step. It treats the university not
only as a place of learning but as a platform for democratic design.
The organization is structured to train students, faculty, and organizers in the hard skills of
power-building, coalition strategy, narrative authorship, and institutional stewardship. These
skills are applied in real-world contexts. Participants learn to engage the public realm not just as
speakers or critics but as designers.
The initiative operates within a historically Black university context. It maintains administrative
infrastructure, programmatic continuity, and long-term organizational commitment. This is not a
pop-up project. It is a durable civic formation space designed to grow over time.
The decision to build the organization at an HBCU is itself a political statement. It affirms that
the future of democratic life will not be authored from elite white institutions alone. It must be
co-designed by those who have carried civic infrastructure without recognition or reward. The
organization reclaims that history and turns it toward design.
The organization does not stand apart from the university. It animates it. It provides a civic
anchor within the academic ecology. It is a place where democratic theory is tested, translated,
and revised. It is where students learn that public life is not something to enter. It is something to
build.
Democracy Schools as Institutional Design
Democracy schools is the name for a structured method that, when applied properly, transforms
institutions into platforms for civic authorship. Civic authorship means shaping not only
outcomes but the frameworks, relationships, and narratives that define public life. It is the work
of building democratic structure, not simply participating within it.
The democracy schools method addresses a deeper crisis. Many institutions lack the civic
infrastructure necessary to sustain democratic politics, culture, and identity. Students encounter
fragmented systems that invite reaction but rarely support shared construction. democracy
schools respond to this by training people to initiate and shape civic roles and relationships
within institutions. The method treats the university, the coalition, and the legislative process not
as neutral containers but as terrains for civic authorship.
The method is built on five interlocking design practices.26
 First is strategic framing. Participants learn to analyze power structures and identify political
openings. They learn to see where change is possible and what alliances are required.
 Second is public narrative. Students are taught to reframe stories of community,
responsibility, and agency in ways that reveal new democratic possibilities.
26 Author, “Media Frames in an Era of the Local,” Freedom Schools: A Journal of Democracy and Community 1
(2024): 71–91.

 Third is coalition design. Participants map relationships, build trust across difference, and
cultivate shared interests that extend beyond transactional goals.
 Fourth is tactical infrastructure. democracy schools operate across campus, community, and
government. The method embeds participants in real campaigns and institutional
experiments. It creates civic relationships and strategic alignments that extend beyond any
single issue or semester.
 Fifth is reflective authority. Participants are asked to interpret what they build. Reflection
becomes a civic responsibility – an exercise in judgment, accountability, and design.
Together, these practices form a repeatable cycle that helps people and institutions behave
differently. Students begin to recognize the university not as a place to absorb ideas but as a site
of democratic construction. They learn to see coalition work not as a response to problems but as
a form of civic infrastructure. They begin to act not just as participants, but as co-creators of
democratic life. This is what makes democracy schools distinct. They do not affirm democracy
as a value. They build it through practice, structure, and institutional authorship.
Having outlined the framework’s theoretical pillars, the essay concludes by considering what it
means to build forward. It asks how institutions can carry democratic authorship into the future.
Section V. Five Theoretical Contributions
By treating design as a core democratic practice, this framework allows us to analyze not only
whether people are included, but whether the institutions themselves are built to sustain
collective agency. It also gives strategic actors a way to assess whether their efforts are building
capacity that can outlast specific campaigns, coalitions, or crises. Civic architecture is both
descriptive and prescriptive. It helps diagnose structural conditions and guides the work of
construction. It affirms that democratic life is not self-generating. It must be built, and it must be
built well.
This framework builds on John Dewey’s insight that democracy is not just a system of
government but a mode of associated living.27 It affirms that experience and participation matter
but adds that experience alone is not enough. Institutions must be intentionally designed to
sustain public action and shared responsibility. Civic architecture also echoes Hannah Arendt’s
concern for the conditions of appearance, where political life depends on a shared world.28 But it
extends that concern by asking who builds that world, how it is structured, and what forms allow
it to persist.
Civic architecture offers a new analytic and strategic framework for understanding democratic
life. It shifts attention from participation to design. Where traditional paradigms focus on
individual agency, deliberation, or engagement, civic architecture centers the institutional forms
that make those practices durable, meaningful, and scalable. It treats institutions not merely as
vessels for democratic activity but as civic terrains that encode power, authorship, and
accountability. This is more than a metaphor. Just as physical architecture shapes how we live
27 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, 1954).
28 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

together in space, civic architecture shapes how we live together in public. It rejects the hope that
democracy can be sustained by participation alone and insists that freedom depends on design.
This framework reframes democracy not as a fixed system, but as an ongoing project of design.
It allows us to analyze not only whether people are included, but whether the institutions
themselves are built to sustain collective agency. It also gives strategic actors a way to assess
whether their efforts are building capacity that can outlast specific campaigns, coalitions, or
crises.
In this sense, civic architecture is both descriptive and prescriptive – it helps diagnose structural
conditions and guides the work of construction. It affirms that democratic life is not self-
generating. It must be built.
Black Institutional Leadership as Civic Infrastructure
Black institutions have served as civic infrastructure in the deepest sense. They were not merely
symbolic or supplementary. They functioned as spaces where democratic life could be practiced,
sustained, and passed on. In the face of exclusion and violence, Black communities built
churches, schools, cooperatives, and advocacy organizations that nurtured leadership and
cultivated agency. These institutions carried the weight of public responsibility. They taught
people how to speak, organize, negotiate, and care for a collective future.
This legacy reveals a powerful truth. Civic infrastructure does not begin with funding or policy.
It begins with design rooted in experience. Black institutional leadership shows how civic
identity can be formed even under conditions of abandonment. It models what it means to create
public life from the ground up. These institutions did not wait for permission to govern. They
built the structures through which community, memory, and public work could flourish. Today,
they offer more than inspiration. They offer a working model of how to embed civic authorship
in durable form.
Interlocking Domains of Power-Building
Civic architecture is not a single intervention. It is a framework for integrating multiple domains
of power-building into a coherent practice. Organizing, education, policy, and narrative are often
treated as separate efforts. Civic architecture brings them together. It creates the conditions
where people can learn, act, reflect, and redesign institutions in ways that build capacity over
time. Rather than focusing on one lever or campaign, it aligns different forms of power so that
each strengthens the others.
This interdependence matters. Organizing without narrative can become transactional. Policy
without public learning can become detached. Education without real stakes can become
abstract. Civic architecture asks how these domains can be combined to support shared
authorship and structural change. It builds ecosystems, not just programs. It invites practitioners
to design across boundaries, so that the work of democracy becomes not just reactive, but
generative and sustained.

Narrative Authority and Civic Naming
Democracy depends not only on formal structures but also on how people understand themselves
in public life. Narrative shapes what counts as possible, legitimate, and worth fighting for. Yet
too often, the power to name public issues and define collective identity remains concentrated in
elite institutions. Civic architecture challenges this by building spaces where narrative authority
is shared. It gives ordinary people the tools to name their conditions, tell their histories, and
frame their own political meaning.
This work is not peripheral. It is central to democratic design. When people can reshape the
stories that define them, they gain the power to reshape the institutions they inhabit. Naming
becomes a political act. It clarifies what is at stake and who belongs. Civic architecture supports
this by embedding reflection, interpretation, and storytelling into the design of public spaces. It
treats narrative as a form of authorship, not just expression. In doing so, it shifts democracy from
a system people observe to a story they can help write.
A Shift from Engagement to Design
For decades, civic reform has focused on engagement. The goal has been to increase
participation, expand access, and invite people into public life. These efforts have opened doors,
but they have rarely changed the room. Too often, participation happens inside structures that
remain fixed. People are asked to speak but not to shape. They are invited to contribute but not to
construct.
Civic architecture begins where engagement leaves off. It asks what kind of institutional forms
are needed to support real agency. It moves from inviting people in to giving them the means to
build. This shift is not about abandoning participation. It is about deepening it. Design becomes
the new frontier of democracy.
When people help shape the rules, the relationships, and the frameworks that govern their lives,
they move from being users of democracy to being its authors. This is the work that sustains
democratic life beyond moments of action. It is what makes power public and durable.
Section VI. Designing for Democratic Futures
Democracy is in trouble. The problem is not apathy. People still care, and they still act. But the
structures that carry democratic agency have weakened. Participation continues. So does protest.
What has eroded is the public infrastructure that gives civic energy a place to live and grow.
Movements emerge, surge, and disappear. Engagement becomes a cycle of disconnected
moments. The challenge is not a lack of commitment. It is a lack of institutional form.
Civic architecture offers a different starting point. It asks us to think about institutions as spaces
that can be shaped. They are not neutral backdrops. They are designed environments, and they
can be redesigned. This perspective shifts the focus. Instead of asking only who participates, we
begin to ask who authors the structures through which decisions are made, values are
transmitted, and public responsibilities are shared. The goal is not just inclusion. The goal is co-

creation. This is the work of democratic design. It calls for the deliberate construction of
frameworks that can sustain civic life.
This article has argued that civic architecture is more than a metaphor. It is a practical and
strategic framework for rebuilding the institutional foundations of democracy. The five
contributions outlined in the previous section point to a new blueprint. Together, they help us
recognize the difference between symbolic gestures and structural authorship. They guide us
toward institutions that are responsive, inclusive, and lasting. This shift allows for the alignment
of multiple domains – organizing, education, policy, and narrative – into a cohesive strategy of
public authorship.
The democracy schools method, developed through the Farmer House, puts this framework into
practice. It helps students see that institutions are not fixed. They are civic terrain. These are not
just places to navigate. They are places that can be shaped. The method connects classroom
learning to coalition-building. It links public narrative to strategic responsibility. Students learn
not just how to participate, but how to govern. They learn how to author the very structures they
move through. What begins as a local practice becomes a vision for democratic rebuilding. Not
from the top, but from within.
To design for democracy is to resist despair. It means refusing to accept fragmentation, fatigue,
and elite control as permanent features of civic life. Institutions are not natural. They are made.
And they can be remade. This is difficult work. It takes time, resources, and long-term
commitment. But it is not impossible. Black institutions have modeled this possibility for
generations. Civic educators and organizers have sustained it. What we need now is a way to
connect and amplify these efforts. Not by imposing uniformity, but by coordinating design
across difference.
Democracy does not survive on ideals alone. It endures through structure. It lives through the
institutions that carry public responsibility forward.
Returning to the Four Democratic Commitments
The examples in this essay are meant to clarify how civic architecture strengthens liberal
democracy by returning it to its own interlocking commitments.
First, civic architecture advances individualism by treating persons as agents capable of
judgment and responsibility, not as clients of institutions or spectators of public life. The
democracy schools method operationalizes this by training participants to initiate roles, build
coalitions, and exercise authorial responsibility rather than simply express preferences.
Second, civic architecture advances universalism by insisting that the institutional conditions for
public work and shared authorship must be broadly available in principle and in practice, not
reserved for those with elite credentials or organizational access. In this sense, the Black
institutional tradition highlighted here is not a parochial case but a practical demonstration of
democratic possibility under constraint that can be translated across settings.

Third, civic architecture advances egalitarianism by designing institutions where moral standing
is not merely declared but enacted through shared governance, shared responsibility, and the
distribution of narrative authority. The Jeannes Teachers and Rosenwald lineage illustrate how
professionals and communities can build structures that treat ordinary people as co-authors of the
public world even under conditions of exclusion.
Finally, civic architecture advances meliorism by treating institutions as improvable through
design, not as fixed containers within which civic life must simply cope. The framework links
democratic renewal to the practical work of redesign, showing how civic agency can be
stabilized, transmitted, and scaled through durable forms.
Taken together, these commitments clarify the argument’s close: civic architecture does not
move beyond liberal democracy. It strengthens liberal democracy’s civic foundations by making
its values institutionally livable.
To design for democracy is to build the environments where agency becomes practice, where
belonging becomes shared labor, and where the future becomes something we shape together.
Like any architecture, this one will need repair. Its strength lies not in perfection but in the
willingness to rebuild as the moral conditions of democracy change. What matters most is the
capacity to begin again together.
So this article ends with an invitation.
 To funders: invest not in outreach, but in authorship.
 To educators: treat your institutions not as delivery platforms, but as civic terrain.
 To organizers: do more than mobilize – build the rules, the rooms, and the relationships that
last.
 To scholars: use theory to construct, not just to critique.
Democracy must be built. It will not build itself. The task is difficult. The work is unfinished.
But the path is open to all who are willing to build.

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Manuscript (Word version) Click here to access/download;Manuscript (Word
version);Response to Reviewers.docx
Response to Reviewers
Reviewer #1: Thank you for the strong endorsement. I reviewed all citations and references for
accuracy and consistency and corrected minor formatting issues, including author attributions
and journal titles, in line with the journal’s style.
Reviewer #2: Thank you for the helpful suggestion. I added a brief closing subsection in Section
VI that returns explicitly to the four interlocking democratic commitments (individualism,
universalism, egalitarianism, and meliorism) and clarifies how the essay’s examples advance
each dimension.

Civic Architecture
• To establish civic architecture as a viable subfield of political science, it (civic architecture) must have a definition – clear,
rigorous, defensible, substantive.
The definition of civic architecture being proposed here is
o
 The durable institutions
 That embed
Public work
o
Collective authorship
o
Narrative authority, and
o
Relational power
o
 Into democratic life
Not as (civic architecture treats institutions not as) static entities but as constructed infrastructures of democracy
o
In scholarly work
o
 Civic architecture is structured around four analytic dimensions
1. Public work
2. Collective authorship
3. Narrative authority
4. Relational power
 These often appear braided together in public argument and organizing as ‘real power,’ or authority over rules, budgets,
seats, and the story of the community; the braiding ensures consistency between disciplinary scaffolding and public-
facing argument.
• As a subfield of political science, civic architecture
Is
o
 A domain (of organized knowledge and inquiry)
Domains
o
• Provide
Broad boundaries of knowledge and inquiry
o
 What counts as a legitimate question in the domain
 Who belongs
 What methods are recognized

• Have
A focus
o
 The focus of a domain
Specifies what a field studies
o
A framework
o
 The framework of a domain
Specifies how a field studies it
o
The focus and the framework of a domain
o
 Structure
Inquiry
o
 Provide
The analytical backbone for
o
• Research programs
• Case studies, and
• Theoretical claims
 Reinforce
One another
o
Together the focus and the framework of a domain
o
 Form
A coherent basis for treating a domain as such – a domain
o
 Function
To
o
• Narrow a domain’s scope into a core concern
For example
o
 Political science focuses on power and governance
 Sociology focuses on social relations
 Civic architecture focuses on the institutional arrangements that embed and sustain agency
over time
 A broad framework of concepts and understandings
The broad framework of concepts and understandings that is civic architecture
o

• Enables
Scholars to do scientific research in the domain of civic architecture
o
• Specifies
What civic architecture scholars study
o
• Begins
With
o
 The ontological claim that institutions are constructed realities, not fixed or given entities
Institutions
o
• Are
Durable infrastructures
o
 But their durability arises from practices, rules, and shared authorship, not from inevitability
Both
o
 Material
They consist of physical structures, organizational forms
o
 Relational
They consist of symbolic practices that together stabilize democratic agency (identities)
o
Sites
o
 Of authorship
Their being is defined by whether and how they embed
o
1. Public work
2. Collective authorship
3. Narrative authority
COMMENT from AI
o
 Calling narrative an infrastructure is innovative but vulnerable. Needs
mechanisms: how do stories/symbols concretely stabilize institutions?
My reply (crosschecked and lauded): Narratives anchor meanings,
o
definitions, ideas and more, which shape how people think and ultimately
act. Does a narrative align or clash with the assignment of roles within an
institution? This would be an important question to ask in considering the
long-term viability of an institution.
4. Relational power

 The ontology of civic architecture therefore differs from traditional views that treat institutions as
constraints; here, institutions are understood as platforms for production – producers of democratic life
itself.
Genealogical positioning of civic architecture
o
• Civic architecture stands within and against long traditions in democratic thought
Its genealogy is necessary not as a pedigree but as proof of continuity and innovation. Without a
o
genealogy, the subfield risks appearing as an invented metaphor; with it, civic architecture
becomes a visible extension of democratic theory and practice.
• Foundations
Pragmatism
o
 Contribution
Anchors civic architecture in traditions of experimentalism, reconstruction, and agency
o
 John Dewey
The Public and Its Problems – democracy as experimental association, continually
o
remade
 George Herbert Mead
Interaction and social authorship as the basis of collective agency
o
 Melvin Rogers
The Undiscovered Dewey – renewal of pragmatist democracy for the 21st century
o
Republicanism
o
 Contribution
Establishes action, plurality, and freedom as design imperatives for institutions
o
 Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition – distinction between labor, work, and action, politics as
o
authorship in common space
 Philip Pettit
Republicanism – freedom as non-domination, requiring durable institutions
o
Democratic World-Loss
o
 Contribution
Identifies the condition in which the shared world that democracy requires begins to
o
erode. Names world-loss as the ontological failure that precedes institutional collapse.

Civic architecture takes this insight as its point of departure, developing the design
framework needed to rebuild the shared world in institutional form.
 Sheldon Wolin
Tocqueville Between Two Worlds – maps the conditions under which the shared
o
democratic world erodes, revealing how world-loss precedes political and institutional
breakdown
Wolin explicitly argues that Tocqueville discovers a “design science” of society – and
o
that this insight matters for Civic Architecture
But Wolin never develops
o
• A design method
• A scaffold
• A design process
• A repair framework
• A world-building curriculum
• A theory of institutional labor
• A practice of civic architecture
So in the genealogy section and nowhere else is where Wolin belongs
o
• → Between Republicanism and Institutional Design
• → As the theorist who names world-loss and glimpses the need for design
Adding Wolin elsewhere in this scaffold would
o
• Confuse the architecture
• Overstate his contribution
• Imply that he developed design practice (he didn’t)
• Reduce my originality
What Wolin actually says about Tocqueville
o
• In Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, Wolin argues that
Tocqueville saw democracy not as a regime but as a world
o
That world had a design logic—a set of structures, habits, meanings, and
o
institutions

Tocqueville’s real discovery was a “science of society’s design”:
o
how the world of democracy holds together or falls apart
• This is absolutely correct
• But Wolin himself
Does not develop a design science
o
Does not build a method of reconstruction
o
Does not produce an institutional framework
o
• He names that Tocqueville saw democracy as something “designed,”
but he does not build the design discipline himself
• Democratic world and world-loss is an ontological condition
Even when he says Tocqueville discovered a “design science,” Wolin uses that
o
phrase to mean
 Tocqueville understood democratic world-building
 Tocqueville identified how institutional forms shape civic life
 Tocqueville revealed the world’s fragility and internal dynamics
• Wolin’s concept of “design science” is descriptive, not prescriptive
It is diagnostic, not operational
o
He never develops
o
 A method
 A scaffold
 A design process
 A repair framework
 A world-building curriculum
 A theory of institutional labor
Institutional Design and Polycentric Governance
o
 Contribution
Positions institutions as sites of design and experimentation, not fixed containers
o
 Elinor and Vincent Ostrom
Demonstrations of collective governance, institutional diversity, and design principles
o
beyond state/market binaries

 Jane Mansbridge
Institutions mediating cooperation and conflict.
o
Public Work
o
 Contribution
Direct precursor, re-centering citizenship as labor, not voice
o
Civic architecture expands this by making institutional design itself the object
o
 Harry Boyte
Citizenship as work, building the commons through durable practice
o
 Boyte’s successors
Civic agency frameworks and organizing traditions
o
Cultural and Narrative Turns
o
 Contribution
Adds narrative authority as essential infrastructure of democratic life
o
 Raymond Williams
Keywords – institutions live through language and cultural struggle
o
 Robert Hariman & John Louis Lucaites,
No Caption Needed – public culture and visual rhetoric
o
 Lauren Berlant
Cruel Optimism – affective attachments shaping institutions
o
• Where civic architecture breaks new ground
From engagement to design
o
 Moves beyond participation to institutional authorship
From civil society to infrastructure
o
 Shifts focus from voluntary associations to durable, designed structures
 COMMENT from AI
You frame CA as displacing civil society studies. Be sure to show you’ve engaged
o
Putnam, Skocpol, Habermas so it doesn’t look dismissive.
• What would this look like, I am wondering.
From AI
o
 Here’s what that would look like. Right now, your draft says:
From civil society to infrastructure
o

• Shifts focus from voluntary associations to durable, designed structures
That’s crisp – but it risks sounding like you’re brushing off the
o
entire civil society literature. To bulletproof it, you’d show you’ve
read and absorbed that literature, then explain how civic
architecture goes further. Something like:
 Civil society studies have long underscored the role of voluntary
associations in sustaining democracy. Tocqueville’s early
observations of associational life, Putnam’s concern with
declining social capital, and Skocpol’s accounts of civic decline
all highlight the importance of networks and participation.
Habermas adds the normative dimension of the public sphere,
where civil society generates legitimacy through discourse.
 Civic architecture builds on, but is not reducible to, these
accounts. While civil society studies often treat associations as
the heart of democratic life, civic architecture focuses on the
infrastructures – the designed, durable institutions – that make
authorship and agency possible across generations. Associations
can be ephemeral; infrastructures stabilize. Civic architecture
therefore incorporates the insights of civil society (the value of
networks, publics, and cultural capital) but reframes them
within a design lens: how institutions are authored, sustained,
and legitimated over time.
From narrative as expression to narrative as authority
o
 Frames cultural meaning as structural legitimacy.
• Cross-check outcome
Genealogy is coherent, cumulative, and necessary. Each strand provides concepts without which
o
civic architecture could not exist. The final break – design, infrastructure, narrative authority –
shows genuine innovation rather than redundancy.
Cannon – revised from AI
o
• Comment from AI

Problem: The original cannon output (below) risks looking like sprawl. You’ve got Dewey,
o
Tocqueville, Arendt, Rogers, Ostrom, Boyte, Mansbridge, Berlant, Hariman/Lucaites, Polletta,
Williams – basically a reading list. That breadth can look like you’re piling on names for
legitimacy rather than defining a coherent, distinctive canon.
 Note on Canon
Two versions are included here for different purposes:
o
• Original canon (instructional / comprehensive): shows the full breadth of thinkers and
texts that inform civic architecture. Useful for teaching, genealogy, and internal
scaffolding.
• Keystone + auxiliary canon (field-defining): identifies the core texts that anchor the
subfield and the supporting figures who enrich it. This is the version to use in
publication and review contexts.
Keeping both ensures the canon is both comprehensive for instruction and coherent for
o
scholarly defense.
Why risky: Reviewers could say, “This isn’t a canon, it’s an anthology.” If everything is
o
included, nothing is defining.
Keystone Canon (foundational texts and thinkers)
o
 These are the 5–6 pillars that define the field and without which civic architecture cannot
stand:
1. John Dewey – The Public and Its Problems
• Democracy as experimental association, institutions as reconstructed through
practice.
2. Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition
• Politics as action and authorship in shared space; institutions as spaces of plurality.
3. Elinor Ostrom – Governing the Commons
• Institutions as designed systems of collective governance beyond state/market
binaries.
4. Harry Boyte – Public Work writings
• Citizenship as work, institutions built through durable civic labor.

5. Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism
• Institutions sustained through affect, attachments, and cultural meaning.
6. Raymond Williams – Keywords
• Institutions live through contested language and cultural struggle.
Auxiliary and Bridging Figures
o
 These enrich and expand the canon but aren’t the load-bearing beams
George Herbert Mead – Mind, Self, and Society (1934), interaction and authorship as
o
social agency.
Philip Pettit – Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), freedom as
o
non-domination, design imperatives for durable institutions.
Vincent Ostrom – The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (1973),
o
polycentric governance, federalism as democratic design.
Jane Mansbridge – Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980), cooperation and conflict as
o
institutional dynamics.
Melvin Rogers – Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980), renewal of pragmatist
o
democracy for the 21st century.
Robert Hariman & John Louis Lucaites – No Caption Needed, Visual rhetoric and public
o
culture as democratic infrastructure.
Francesca Polletta – It Was Like a Fever, Narrative as mechanism of legitimacy and
o
participation.
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America, Associational life as seedbed of durable
o
institutions.
Why this works
o
 The keystone six give you balance across traditions: pragmatism, republicanism, institutional
design, public work, cultural/affective theory.
 The auxiliaries show breadth and connectivity without looking like you’re trying to canonize
everyone.
 It makes the canon both defensible and distinctive – not a laundry list, but a spine with ribs.
Cannon – original
o
• Civic Architecture requires a canon broad enough to sustain a subfield yet specific enough to
distinguish it from neighboring literatures.

• Three clusters form the backbone of this canon.
Each is necessary because it speaks directly to the problems civic architecture is designed to
o
solve
 The erosion of durable institutions
 The loss of democratic authorship
 The absence of cultural legitimacy in institutional design
Clusters
o
1. Foundational Democratic Theory
Why it matters
o
• Civic architecture cannot proceed without grounding in the core traditions of
democracy. The traditions define what democracy is for (agency, pluralism,
authorship), not just how it functions procedurally. They anchor the normative
commitments of the field.
John Dewey
o
• The Public and Its Problems
Democracy as a mode of associated living and ongoing reconstruction
o
Alexis de Tocqueville
o
• Democracy in America
Associational life as the seedbed of durable democratic institutions
o
Hannah Arendt
o
• The Human Condition
Distinction between labor, work, and action; democracy as action in a shared
o
world
Melvin Rogers
o
• The Undiscovered Dewey
Pragmatist democracy as a framework for ongoing democratic renewal
o
2. Public Work and Institutional Design
Why the literature matters
o

• Civic architecture focuses on institutions as sites of authorship. This cluster provides
the intellectual and empirical grounding for treating institutions not as fixed
containers but as designed and redesigned through civic practice.
Elinor Ostrom
o
• Governing the Commons
Empirical demonstration of collective governance beyond state/market binaries.
o
Harry Boyte
o
• Public Work writings
Citizenship as work: people authoring the commons through durable practices.
o
Jane Mansbridge
o
• Beyond Adversary Democracy
Institutions structured by cooperation as well as competition
o
Vincent Ostrom
o
• The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration
Federalism and polycentricity as democratic design.
o
3. Narrative Authority and Cultural Frames
Why the literature matters
o
• Institutions endure not only through rules but through the stories, symbols, and
cultural repertoires that authorize them. Without narrative authority, democratic
institutions lack legitimacy and cannot be sustained.
Lauren Berlant
o
• Cruel Optimism
Cultural affects and attachments shape what institutions mean to people.
o
Robert Hariman & John Louis Lucaites
o
• No Caption Needed
Visual rhetoric as public culture, sustaining democratic imagination.
o
Francesca Polletta
o
• It Was Like a Fever
Narrative as a central mechanism of democratic participation and legitimacy.
o
Raymond Williams
o

• Keywords
Language as a terrain of cultural struggle over meaning.
o
 A practice field
Sustaining democratic life in the design of institutions and narratives
o
Communities
o
• Authoring narratives, institutions, and rules; ultimately itself constituting political theory
• Building civic order
 A cultural and a social movement
 About
Treating institutions as constructed and durable infrastructures, designed and/or redesigned to embody democratic
o
agency
 Not
Synonymous with
o
• Public administration
Public administration studies the management of bureaucracies
o
 COMMENT from AI
Oversimplified. PA also includes reform, design, and normative traditions, so critics may call this
o
reductive.
• What would be a fair way of putting it, I am wondering.
From AI
o
 Public administration studies how bureaucracies are structured, managed, and reformed. It
often emphasizes efficiency, accountability, and administrative design.
 Civic architecture differs in focus: rather than management or reform of existing
bureaucracies, it asks how institutions themselves can be authored or redesigned as
infrastructures of democratic agency.
Equivalent to
o
• Civic studies
Civic studies focuses on civic agency in general
o
 COMMENT from AI

Needs sharper distinction. Civic studies claims some of the same ground. You will need to show how
o
CA is different in method and outcome.
• What does this look like, I am wondering.
From AI
o
 Civic studies asks how people decide what they should do together. It combines ethical
reflection (what is right or just) with practical judgment (what people can realistically
achieve in context). Civic architecture builds on that concern but shifts the focus: instead of
examining agency in the abstract, it studies the institutional designs that make such agency
durable – how rules, roles, and narratives are authored into lasting infrastructures of
democracy.
Reducible to
o
• Institutionalism in political science
Institutionalism analyzes how institutions constrain behavior
o
 COMMENT from AI
Risk of caricature. Institutionalists also study design and change – might look like a straw man.
o
• What would be a fair way of putting it be then, I am wondering.
From AI
o
 Institutionalism in political science studies how institutions shape political behavior. Classic
accounts emphasized constraints and path dependence, but newer strands also analyze
institutional change, design, and reform. Civic architecture draws from this literature but
makes a distinct move: it treats institutions not only as contexts that constrain or evolve but
as platforms deliberately authored to embed democratic agency. Where institutionalism asks
how institutions affect outcomes, civic architecture asks how institutions can be built and
rebuilt to sustain authorship and legitimacy over time.
The same as
o
• Public policy outputs
Public policy studies the outputs of government – the laws, programs, and regulations that result from the
o
policy process.
 COMMENT from AI
Too shallow. Public policy studies policy processes, contexts, and impacts in addition to policy
o
products.

• What would be a fair way of putting it be then, I am wondering.
From AI
o
 Public policy studies how governments make and implement decisions. Classic accounts
emphasize outputs – laws, programs, and regulations – as the products of the policy process.
But the field also examines agenda-setting, implementation, and evaluation, often with
prescriptive concern for effectiveness, equity, and efficiency. Civic architecture draws from
this literature but takes a distinct angle: rather than analyzing the policies that result, it
studies the institutional infrastructures that shape what policies can even be imagined or
sustained. Where public policy asks how choices translate into outputs, civic architecture
asks how institutions can be authored and redesigned to embed democratic agency over time.
Has
o
 A focus, frameworks, methodology, research agenda
Focus
o
• Is (The focus of civic architecture is)
The institutional arrangements that embed and sustain agency over time
o
Organized into four core dimensions
o
1. Public work
The practices through which people collectively build institutions
o
2. Collective authorship
The structures that allow citizens to co-author institutional direction
o
3. Narrative authority (see comment earlier in)
The symbolic legitimacy that frames institutions as democratic
o
4. Relational power
The networks of influence that embed institutions in larger democratic systems
o
Frameworks
o
• Concepts and understandings
• The frameworks of civic architecture provide the structural lenses through which the focus of civic architecture is
analyzed
• The frameworks of civic architecture are
Design framework – institutions are treated as designed spaces that can be evaluated and redesigned
o

Genealogical framework – institutions are situated within historical and theoretical traditions
o
Methodological framework – a mixed-methods approach combining historical, ethnographic, comparative, and
o
cultural analysis
Research program framework – structured agendas of fundable projects and dissertations that ensure viability
o
Critique-rebuttal framework – systematic anticipation of attacks and development of hardened responses
o
Methodology
o
• The methodology of civic architecture
Must
o
 Do
More than describe cases or theorize ideals
o
 Provide
A coherent way of generating, testing, and refining knowledge claims that demonstrate the subfield’s
o
legitimacy
 Blend
Normative reasoning, institutional analysis, and cultural interpretation into a unified framework
o
 Remain
Comparative
o
• Asking what lessons civic architecture can draw across geographies, institutions, and traditions
Generative
o
• The aim is not only to analyze but to propose institutional designs capable of rebuilding democratic
infrastructure
Is
o
 Mixed methods
 Normative and practical
 Narrative and cultural
 Comparative and generative
Integrates
o
 Historical analysis
Historical analysis situates institutions in long arcs of democratic development
o
 Case study research
Case studies allow for thick description and contextual specificity.
o

 Ethnography, and
Ethnography captures lived experience and cultural meaning
o
 Comparative design analysis
Comparative design analysis identifies generalizable principles across sites
o
Takes
o
 The institution itself as the central unit of analysis, rather than individuals or isolated policies
Institutions are treated as designed and redesigned spaces where authorship, power, and legitimacy are
o
enacted
Does
o
 Not
Separate normative theory from empirical inquiry
o
Treats
o
 Institutional design as a normative-practical question: what should institutions look like if they are to
embody democracy as authorship and infrastructure?
 Empirical research tests and refines these normative commitments
Includes
o
 Analysis of narratives, symbols, and cultural repertoires
Provides
o
 The tools
Discourse analysis
o
Rhetorical criticism
o
Visual culture studies
o
 To understand how institutions are authorized and sustained
Tools like this are important because institutions depend on legitimacy, methodology must
o
• Cross-check outcome: The methodology is logically consistent, cumulative, and defensible. It specifies a distinct
unit of analysis, uses recognized methods, blends normative and empirical inquiry, and explains how research can
both analyze and generate institutional designs. This resolves potential criticisms that civic architecture lacks rigor,
is merely metaphorical, or overextends cultural analysis.
Cross-check outcome: The focuses and frameworks are distinct but mutually reinforcing. They avoid redundancy, map
o
cleanly onto political science standards, and provide a logically consistent scaffolding for the subfield.
Research Agenda
o

• Civic Architecture’s research agenda is structured around five durable programs, each designed to generate
Fundable projects
o
Dissertation pathways, and
o
Comparative findings across political science
o
• Together, they form a cumulative body of work that defines the field
• Programs
1. Genealogical excavations of democratic institutions
 Purpose
Recover and analyze historical cases of civic institutional design to show how democratic agency has
o
been authored in practice
 Methods
Archival research, intellectual genealogy, historical case studies
o
 Deliverables
A revised genealogy of democratic institutions that integrates neglected traditions (e.g., HBCUs, labor
o
unions, mutual aid)
2. Institutional ethnographies and design studies
 Purpose
Examine living institutions (universities, legislatures, civic alliances) as sites of design and authorship
o
 Methods
Ethnography, comparative institutional analysis, participant observation
o
 Deliverables
Case studies of civic infrastructure in practice; design principles that travel across contexts
o
3. Narrative authority and cultural frames (see comment earlier in)
 Purpose
Map how stories, symbols, and cultural repertoires operate as civic infrastructure
o
 Methods
Discourse analysis, cultural sociology, visual studies
o
 Deliverables
A framework for narrative authority as a measurable variable in institutional design
o
4. Democratic infrastructure interventions
 Purpose

Test institutional redesigns that embed authorship (e.g., Democracy Schools, Apprentice → Associate
o
→ Author pathway)
 Methods
Institutional experiments, design-based research, policy intervention studies
o
 Deliverables
Evidence that new institutional designs can stabilize democratic agency at scale
o
5. Crossfield integration and comparative synthesis
 Purpose
Test civic architecture’s distinctiveness against neighboring subfields (institutionalism, deliberative
o
democracy, civil society studies) (see comment earlier in)
 Methods
Comparative field analysis, meta-review of literatures
o
 Deliverables
Published syntheses demonstrating why civic architecture is a coherent subfield rather than a redundant
o
metaphor
Critics they rebut
o
• Every emerging subfield must anticipate criticism
• Civic Architecture is no exception
• The following critiques have been identified as the most likely challenges, along with hardened rebuttals to defend
the subfield’s coherence and legitimacy
 Civic architecture is merely metaphorical
Rebuttal
o
• Civic architecture designates a distinct unit of analysis – institutions as designed infrastructures of
democratic authorship. This is not a metaphor but a methodological commitment. Just as international
relations treats the state as its core unit, civic architecture treats institutions as designed spaces of power,
narrative authority, and collective agency.
 The subfield overlaps with existing areas (public administration, civil society studies) (see comment earlier in)
Rebuttal
o
• Civic architecture reconfigures these areas by placing institutional design at the center, rather than
management or participation. Where public administration asks how to manage institutions, civic

architecture asks how to build them. Where civil society studies look to voluntary associations, civic
architecture reframes the durable infrastructures that sustain democratic agency. (see comment earlier
in)
 The methodology lacks rigor
Rebuttal
o
• The methodology is mixed, cumulative, and defensible. It integrates historical, ethnographic, case study,
and comparative design methods, all of which are widely accepted in political science. Normative and
empirical inquiry are joined in a coherent synthesis, ensuring analytical depth and scholarly rigor.
COMMENT from AI
o
 Strong claim but vague. You will need to show exactly how the methods blend, not just assert.
What would this look like, I wonder.
o
• From AI
The methodology
o
 Integrates historical, ethnographic, case study, and comparative design methods
Each contributes a distinct angle
o
• Historical analysis → situates institutions in long arcs of democratic
development
• Ethnography → captures lived experience and cultural meaning
• Case studies → provide thick description and contextual specificity
• Comparative design → identifies generalizable principles across sites
Normative and empirical inquiry reinforce one another
o
• Normative commitments guide the questions
• Empirical findings refine and test those commitments
The result is a cumulative framework that generates theory, tests it in practice,
o
and produces design principles for democratic institutions
 The research program is too ambitious or diffuse
Rebuttal
o
• The agenda has been broken down into fundable projects and viable dissertation topics, each clearly
scoped and tied to existing funding logics. This demonstrates that civic architecture can produce
bounded, feasible research programs while still advancing a broader vision.

 Variables are unclear or immeasurable
Rebuttal
o
• Key variables such as authorship, narrative authority, and institutional durability are operationalized in
terms of observable practices, texts, and organizational forms. This ensures clarity and measurability.
The framework draws from existing traditions in institutionalism, cultural analysis, and governance
studies.
• Cross-check outcome: Each critique has been addressed with a hardened rebuttal. The logic is internally consistent,
grounded in disciplinary standards, and defensible against attack. Civic architecture emerges not as a fragile
metaphor but as a robust subfield capable of standing up to scrutiny.
Positions itself
o
 As a cross-cutting subfield of political science by defining its focus area and frameworks
Integrates
o
1. The field’s conceptual foundations
2. Unit of analysis
What does unit of analysis mean?
o
• It (the unit of analysis) is
The entity that
o
 That
A field treats as (the thing) worth studying
o
• Comparative politics → countries, regimes
• IR → states, international systems
• Public policy → policies, agencies
• Civic architecture → institutions designed for democratic authorship (universities, legislatures,
coalitions, alliances)
Living Case Study of Civic Architecture
o
 A subfield cannot live on theory alone. It requires cases that demonstrate its empirical
grounding and generative potential.
The Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University functions
o
is a living case study of civic architecture.
• COMMENT from AI

Good empirical case, but risks looking like advocacy.
o
Frame tightly as method and evidence rather than institutional promotion.
o
 What would this look like, I wonder?
From AI
o
• Here is how you could reframe the Farmer House case study in
scaffold style, so it reads as method and evidence, not promo.
Living case study of civic architecture
o
 The Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House at Huston-
Tillotson University functions as a working laboratory of
democratic design
Serves as an empirical site for testing the four analytic
o
dimensions
• Public work → student–community projects producing
durable outcomes
• Collective authorship → decision-making structures
that distribute direction-setting power
• Narrative authority → reinterpretation of civil rights
legacy as living infrastructure
• Relational power → partnerships embedding the lab in
legislative and civic networks
Generates evidence for civic architecture as a subfield
o
• Legislative agendas authored by students →
demonstrate institutional authorship in practice
• Public forums and curricular pathways → demonstrate
how institutions stabilize agency over time
• Statewide HBCU alliance → demonstrates comparative
replication and scaling
Functions not as promotional material, but as proof of
o
concept. It shows how an institution can be designed,
repurposed, and authorized as democratic infrastructure

• It illustrates how institutions can be designed, repurposed, and authorized as
democratic infrastructure
• The site
The Farmer House was established as a working laboratory for democratic design.
o
In the beginning our mission was expressed as advancing bold responsive
inclusive community across the broad cross-section of American life. As the
work matured, that same purpose came to be named civic architecture and
expressed through seeding democracy schools. In this sense the terminology
evolved, but the core purpose has been constant from the start: to honor James
Farmer Jr. while operating as a civic architecture lab that preserves history and
actively generates new democratic practices.
• Design principles in action
Public Work
o
 Students, faculty, and community leaders engage in collaborative projects that
build durable civic outcomes
Collective Authorship
o
 Decision-making structures allow participants to shape the institution’s
direction
Narrative Authority
o
 The Farmer House frames the civil rights tradition not as memory but as
living infrastructure for present struggles
 Relational Power
 Partnerships with legislators, funders, and civic groups embed the institution
in broader networks of influence.
• Outcomes
The Farmer House has
o
 Generated
Student-led legislative agendas
o

• Students at HT developed a Democracy Schools policy agenda
presented to members of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus,
advancing proposals on higher education funding.
Public forums on democracy
o
• Including recently organizing a series of forums linking campus and
community participants in deliberation on higher education and
democracy.
New curricular pathways
o
• Launched pilot courses and faculty-led seminars linking political
science with civic organizing traditions
Statewide alliance building
o
• Anchors the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance, connecting
Huston-Tillotson with Prairie View A&M, Texas Southern, Wiley
College, and Jarvis Christian University in a long-term network for
civic education and legislative engagement.
These outcomes demonstrate how institutions can serve as designed spaces of
o
democratic authorship
• Comparative Relevance
The Farmer House
o
 Is
Not presented as a singular or exceptional case
o
 Serves
As a generative model that can be adapted across contexts – other
o
universities, municipal institutions, and civic organizations
As such, it provides comparative data and design insights for civic
o
architecture as a field
Cross-check outcome: The case study demonstrates the methodology, frameworks, and
o
outcomes of Civic Architecture. It is neither anecdotal nor exceptionalist but exemplary:
a living proof of concept that links theoretical claims to institutional realities.
One’s
o

• Data describes
 About which
One’s findings from a study refer
o
The basic thing
o
 That
A field studies and measures
o
• At different levels of group formation (individuals, organizations, institutions, systems) in the case
of the social sciences
One is making claims about
o
• In some studies, that thing is a person
• In others, it is an organization
• In others, it is a state, law, policy, or institution
What does unit of analysis do?
o
• Turns
What one is interested in into something one can study scientifically
o
3. Disciplinary relevance
By clarifying its unit of analysis and distinct contributions, civic architecture positions itself as a cross-cutting subfield
o
that intersects (interacts) with
• Comparative politics
• Political theory
• Public administration, and
• Sociology
But civic architecture reorganizes their insights around the central problem of democratic institutional design
o
• Fascinating
Studies
o
 The design of institutions as platforms for democratic authorship
 The infrastructural design that shapes what outputs are possible
Asks
o
 How institutions can be deliberately designed to expand democratic authorship
Cross-check outcome

• The definition
Is
o
 Precise
 Non-redundant, and
 Logically distinct
From overlapping fields
o
Frames
o
 Civic architecture
As
o
• A substantive subfield
Not
o
• A metaphorical one
With
o
• A defensible claim to scholarly legitimacy
• Fuck, I have really done it, fully distinguished myself from Harry!

Table: Research Program vs. Research Agenda
Research Program vs. Research Agenda
Research Program (Framework) Research Agenda (Plan of Work)
• A research program • A research agenda
Is Is
o o
 The architectural structure (of  The operational expression of a
concepts and understanding, ideas research program
and beliefs) of inquiry for one’s Translates
o
research  A research framework into a
 The scaffolding that ensures concrete sequence of studies,
coherence across projects, experiments, and outputs
publications, and partnerships, or  What a scholar will actually do
institutional grammar of one’s over the next three to five years
research life Lists
o
Defines the…that organizes a body of  Specific research
o
work over a sustained period of time Questions
o
 Theoretical framework Sites
o
Core concepts Deliverables
o o
Boundaries Defines
o o
 Guiding questions  Priorities
 Design logic Short term
o
Names Medium term
o o
 A field Next papers
o
Establishes Data collection
o o
 Benchmarks and methods for how Collaborations
o
inquiry is conducted Institutional pilots
o
Functions Evolves
o o
 As a living infrastructure or  With the context, but always flows
something durable enough to from the program’s conceptual
anchor evolving work, architecture
collaborators, and subprojects Functions
o
Frames…of research, rather than the  Like a project management layer –
o
what tethered to the program but
The responsive to time, funding, and
o
• Why opportunity
• How • If the program is the building design, the
agenda is the construction schedule
Nature
• Conceptual framework • Operational plan
Focus
• Why and how we study • What and when we study
Timescale
• Enduring (5-20 years) • Strategic (1–5 years)
Output
• To define a field • To advance the field in practice
Summary

• Architecture of inquiry • Sequence of construction
Civic Architecture
Director: Robert M. Ceresa
Institution: Politics Lab, James L. Farmer House (Farmer House), Huston-Tillotson University
(HT)
Broad Deep Purpose or Moral Foundation of the Program
• Civic architecture
Begins
o
 From a moral and practical recognition: democracy is not self-sustaining. Its renewal
depends on rebuilding the moral and institutional forms that allow people to act
together with purpose and trust.
Grows
o
 From the insight that civic exhaustion is not a problem of participation but of design.
Compacts and brokens describe the moral condition beneath all institutions – the
presence or absence of trust, belonging, and shared authorship.
• To design new institutions is therefore to practice repair
• The research program that follows translates this moral foundation into a durable framework
for inquiry, one that joins philosophy, institutional design, and democratic practice into a
single architecture of learning.
Civic Architecture Research Program (Plan Civic Architecture Research Agenda, 2025–
View), 2025-2035, 2045 2028
Foundational Conviction
• Democracy is a design problem
• Its renewal
Depends
o
 On rebuilding the institutional forms that make collective authorship possible
The task of civic architecture is to
o
• Design
Institutions that
o
 Carry democratic agency
 Distribute responsibility
 Sustain moral purpose across generations
 Not on sentiment or participation alone
• This research program and agenda represent the political-economy phase of civic
architecture, where the moral and institutional reconstruction of democratic life is joined to
its material reconstruction through institutional labor and class design. What kinds of
institutional designs can turn civic energy into durable democratic capacity, and how can
the material conditions of institutional labor sustain that capacity across time and class?
This is the core question civic architecture asks.
o
• This document serves as the daily compass for that work, aligning reflection, design, and
practice toward the long project of democratic repair.
• Does this research program mean to schedule the work of the next few years?
Yes, but at two levels:
o
 Program level (architectural)

Defines the enduring structure of inquiry, what will always orient your research
o
(the why and how)
 Agenda level (operational)
Translates that framework into a timed sequence of studies, outputs, and
o
partnerships (the what and when)
This table explicitly states this distinction.
o
 The program gives coherence over 10–20 years
 The agenda “schedules” work in 3-5-year cycles, like your current 2025–2028 agenda
with benchmarks and deliverables
• What makes civic architecture a field?
Get ChaptGPT to help
o
 Civic architecture meets every classical criterion of a field
Criterion and how civic architecture meets it
o
• Definition and object of study
It studies the design of democratic life itself – the durable institutions that
o
embed public work, collective authorship, narrative authority, and
relational power into shared life.
• Distinct analytic grammar
It has four analytic dimensions function as the field’s structural
o
“grammar”
 Public work
 Collective authorship
 Narrative authority
 Relational power
• Genealogy
It draws from…organized into a “keystone canon”
o
 Pragmatism
 Republicanism
 Polycentric Governance
 Public Work
 Cultural/Narrative turns
• Moral foundation
“Compacts and Brokens” provides the field’s ethical architecture,
o
describing the moral condition that underlies all civic structures
• Frameworks and methodology
Civic architecture defines five frameworks and an iterative design cycle
o
linking theory, design, observation, and reflection
 Design
 Genealogy
 Methodological
 Research-program
 Critique-rebuttal
• Empirical grounding
The Farmer House serves as a living case study demonstrating the field’s
o
design principles in practice
• Research infrastructure

It includes a multi-stream research agenda with deliverables, benchmarks,
o
and evaluation cycles
• Defensive coherence
The critique-rebuttal matrix gives the field a systematic response to
o
methodological and conceptual attacks
• The Civic Architecture Research Program • The Civic Architecture Research Agenda
Is Defines
o o
 The enduring architectural structure  The construction schedule for the
of inquiry of and for my research civic architecture field
 The design space where the theory, The work proceeds not as a
o
practice, and institution-building series of projects but as a
that my research involves converge continuous design practice,
I. Purpose (at the academic field level and refining the forms through
research architecture but not the level of which democracy learns to
broader theoretical horizon, movement endure
framing, and planetary synthesis) I. Purpose
 To establish civic architecture as a  To operationalize the Civic
coherent field that unites moral Architecture Research Program by
philosophy, institutional design, and Producing
o
democratic practice. Testing
o
 Core question Institutionalizing
o
What kinds of institutional designs  The theory of democratic design
o
can turn civic energy into durable  Across four interlocking research
democratic capacity? streams
II. Theoretical Architecture 1. Moral Foundations of Repair
 Each element of the conceptual 2. Institutional Architecture of
theoretical framework corresponds to Democracy
one of four domain-relevant 3. Living Designs and Prototypes
dimensions of the research program 4. The Planetary Frame
1. Translation  The agenda aligns
• Conceptual focus Scholarly inquiry
o
Turning private experience Applied design
o o
into public authorship Public dissemination
o
• Primary Sources  Under one integrated cycle of theory,
Dewey practice, and reflection
o
Denning II. Guiding Question
o
2. Authorship  What kinds of institutional designs can
• Conceptual focus turn civic energy into durable
Shared power to define democratic capacity, and how can they
o
rules, language, and agendas be built, tested, and scaled in practice?
• Primary Sources III. Strategic Research Streams
 At least four distinct research streams,
Boyte
o
or areas of inquiry, take shape from the
Rogers
o
historical lineage of democratic
3. Durability
reconstruction that runs through the
• Conceptual focus
Black freedom movement, the HBCU

Carrying civic work across tradition, and the public-work
o
generations philosophy that links education to
• Primary Sources collective authorship in civic
Arendt, Ostrom architecture
o
4. Scalability  The research streams
• Conceptual focus o Draw
Extending agency across • Strength from that inheritance
o
contexts and institutions The research in the streams
o
• Primary Sources translate the inheritance into
Washington, Du Bois the institutional language of
o
5. Durability of Labor Conditions the present
III. Research Streams o Form
1. Moral Foundations of Repair • A bridge from public work to
Concepts civic infrastructure to civic
o
• Compacts and brokens architecture
• Moral repair • The civic architecture’s
• Ethics of trust practical horizon
Objective  The Farmer House and the Texas
o
• Rebuild moral coherence and HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance
carry forward the historical lineage of
institutional trust through design
democratic reconstruction by
2. Institutional Architecture of
transforming historically Black
Democracy
institutions into civic infrastructures or
Concepts
o
laboratories where design and moral
• Grammar of design
formation converge
• Authorship
 The streams
• Narrative authority
1. Moral Foundations of Repair
• Relational power
(2025–2026)
Objective
o • Objective
• Define the analytic structure of
Reconstruct the moral and
democratic capacity o
philosophical basis of civic
3. Living Designs and Prototypes
design
Sites
o • Core Concepts
• Farmer House
Compacts and brokens
• Texas HBCU Democracy o
Moral Repair
o
Schools Alliance
Ethics of Trust
o
• Freedom Schools Journal
• Planned Outputs
Objective
o Journal article
o
• Document and evaluate civic
 The Ethics of Trust:
architecture in practice
Institutional Design and
4. Planetary Frame
the Moral Life of
Concepts
o Democracy.
• Global compacts
Target
o
• Civic LLM
• The Good
• Democratic technology
Society
Objective
o

• Extend design principles to • Rhetoric &
digital and planetary systems Public Affairs
5. Institutional Labor and the Democratic Chapter finalization
o
Economy  For
Concepts Civic Architecture
o o
• Institutional labor book, Part II: The
Moral economy Moral Foundations
o
Civic reproduction of Repair
o
Design power Public lecture and teaching
o o
Democratic class paper
o
Objective  The Work of Rebuilding
o
• Analyze how the material o Student seminar module at
conditions of institutional work Farmer House linking moral
sustain or erode civic repair to civic authorship
architecture and how the 2. Institutional Architecture of
reconstruction of institutional Democracy (2026–2027)
labor forms the base of • Objective
democratic renewal. Formalize the analytic
o
• This stream also gives funders framework and benchmarks
and partners a clear, forward- of civic architecture
looking path beyond the current • Core Concepts
2025–2028 agenda. Translation
o
IV. Methodology
o
Authorship
 An iterative design cycle: Durability
o
1. Theory → frame normative Scalability
o
hypotheses • Planned Outputs
• At the conceptual level, civic Peer-reviewed article
o
architecture begins with  From Action to
normative hypotheses about Architecture: Arendt,
how democracy can be rebuilt Boyte, and the Problem
through institutional design of Durability
This example reads both as Methodology paper
o o
a methodological  Design as a Mode of
description and a Inquiry: Civic
demonstration of how the Architecture as a Field
research program here OSF open research
o
operates in practice  Dataset on institutional
• The hypothesis is that design benchmarks
democracy fails not from apathy o Farmer House faculty
but from bad design. workshop
• The hypothesis guides the  On institutional redesign
theoretical articulation of practices
“structural civic exhaustion” in 3. Living Designs and Prototypes
the working paper. (2026–2028)
• The framing defines • Objective
democracy’s crisis as

architectural, not behavioral or Test civic architecture in
o
cultural practice through Farmer
• Design → translate theory into House, Democracy Schools,
institutional form and partner institutions
Theory then enters practice • Core Sites
through design experiments. Huston-Tillotson University
o
• For example, at HT, this (Politics Lab and Public
hypothesis is embodied in Leadership Pathway)
Public Leadership, where we Texas HBCU Democracy
o
constructed a formation model Schools Alliance
(Apprentice → Associate → Freedom Schools: A Journal
o
Author) that treats student of Democracy & Community
learning as an act of • Planned Outputs:
institutional authorship. Applied paper
o
• The structure itself is a civic  The Farmer House as
design: it redistributes Civic Infrastructure: A
authorship, embeds reflection, Design Case Study
and builds durability into the Annual Alliance report on
o
life of a campus. design learning and
• Observation → gather empirical replication
and interpretive evidence o Integration of student-led
The design produces living authorship protocols
o
data – how students, faculty, (Apprentice-Associate-
and community partners Author)
inhabit and adapt the form. o Conference presentations
For example, through the and proceedings for
o
Texas HBCU Democracy Democracy Schools Year 5
Schools Alliance, the (2027)
Farmer House observes how 4. The Planetary Frame (2027–2028)
civic authorship practices • Objective
scale across campuses and Extend civic architecture
o
how institutional routines principles to
(e.g., public leadership  Technology
roles, reflection protocols)  Global governance
reinforce or erode  Planetary ethics
democratic capacity. • Core Concepts
• Reflection → refine theory Global Compacts
o
through evidence Democratic Technology
o
The observations feed back into Civic LLM
o
theory, producing refined • Planned Outputs
concepts and design principles. Co-authored working paper
o
Example: Observing how with Juan Ceresa
students internalized authorship  Civic LLM and the
led to a refinement of the Design of Democratic
benchmark of durability Technology
showing that durability depends Book chapter
o

less on individual commitment  The Planetary Compact
and more on whether International symposium or
o
institutional roles remember roundtable (target: 2028)
what people have built. linking AI ethics,
• Each cycle converts practice democracy, and design
into insight and insight into new Submission of Civic LLM
o
design rules. research grant proposal to
This recursive process – from Knight or Google Research
theory to design to observation 5. Institutional Labor and the
to reflection – defines civic Democratic Economy (2028–2030)
architecture as both a • Objective
philosophical and empirical Analyze how the material
o
method. It ensures that each conditions of institutional
institutional prototype, from the work sustain or erode civic
Farmer House to the architecture and how the
Democracy Schools Alliance, reconstruction of
functions not only as a civic institutional labor forms the
experiment but as a site of base of democratic renewal.
theory-building. This stream also gives
o
2. Design → Implement institutional funders and partners a clear,
prototypes forward-looking path
3. Observation → Gather empirical beyond the current 2025–
data through ethnography and 2028 agenda.
institutional analysis • Core Concepts
4. Reflection → Refine theory based Institutional labor
o
on observed durability, translation, Moral economy
o
and authorship. Civic reproduction
o
 Each cycle yields design rules that Design power
o
become part of the civic architecture Democratic class
o
corpus • Planned Outputs
V. Benchmarks for Evaluation Working paper
o
 These benchmarks to evaluate all  The Material Base of
Farmer House and Alliance projects Democratic
1. Translation Reconstruction
• Does experience become Comparative case study:
o
collective meaning? Institutional labor across
2. Authorship higher education, healthcare,
• Who holds narrative and and local government
procedural power? Symposium: Civic
o
3. Durability Architecture and the
• Can agency survive turnover Democratic Economy (target
and time? 2030)
4. Scalability Grant proposal:
o
• Can the design travel and adapt? “Institutional Design and the
VI. Core Outputs Moral Economy of
 Form and purpose Democracy”

Scholarly Articles IV. Cross-Cutting Institutional Goals
o
• Advance theory of institutional  Area and goal date of 2028
design Field Definition
o
Case studies & design briefs • Establish Civic Architecture as
o
• Document and analyze living a recognized framework in
architectures democratic theory and practice
Freedom Schools Journal Scholarly Output
o o
• Publish moral and civic • Publish
scholarship Civic Architecture:
o
Civic LLM White Papers Compacts, Brokens, and the
o
• Extend design framework to AI Design of Democratic Life
and digital governance (book)
o Book: Civic Architecture – o And three major peer-
Compacts, Brokens, and the Design reviewed articles
of Democratic Life o Advance the theory and practice of
• Synthesize research into field- institutional labor as the material
defining text foundation of democratic
VII. Daily Compass reconstruction
 When deciding where to focus each o Pedagogical Integration
day • Embed civic architecture
1. Ask principles into the Public
• What design am I testing or Leadership curriculum and
refining today? Democracy Schools formation
2. Record pathway
• How does this work extend one o Network Development
of the four benchmarks? • Expand the Texas HBCU
3. Reflect Democracy Schools Alliance to
• What does this reveal about at least five campuses.
Global Research & AI
democracy’s capacity to learn? o
4. Design • Position the Civic LLM as a
• Translate reflection into a new flagship demonstration of civic
design in technology
institutional form, rule, or
narrative
V. Method and Evaluation
 The aim is not participation within  Each year follows the iterative design
cycle:
failing frameworks, but frameworks
1. Theory articulation →
that make participation formative
2. Institutional design prototype →
3. Observation & documentation →
4. Reflection & redesign
 Success will be evaluated using the
four benchmarks of design: translation,
authorship, durability, and scalability
VI. Annual Milestones
 Year, focus, deliverables
2025–2026
o
• Finalize Book Part II

• Publish Ethics of Trust
• Deliver Farmer House seminar
2026–2027
o
• Publish Action to Architecture
• Launch faculty design
workshop
2027–2028
o
• Publish
Farmer House as Civic
o
Infrastructure
Civic LLM working paper
o
and symposium

The Inventory and the Research Program/Agenda Table serve two complementary functions
inside the Civic Architecture field infrastructure.
1. The Inventory (file: Inventory.docx)
What it is:
A factual, static record of everything the Civic Architecture program has built or is
currently running.
Its role:
• Lists programs, frameworks, partnerships, publications, initiatives
• Defines the core concepts (e.g., PDP, compacts and brokens, institutional labor)
• Documents applied work: Freedom Schools, Farmer House, Civic LLM, etc.
• Designed for external visibility: funders, university leadership, research partners
Think of it as:
The Civic Architecture program’s ledger – a catalog of what exists.
2. The Research Program & Agenda Table (file: 01.4.2 Research Program, Agenda Table,
Pol Economy.docx)
What it is:
A structured architectural design of the field’s long-term intellectual, strategic, and operational
direction.
Its role:
• Defines the field’s moral foundations and theoretical grammar
• Maps the 5 research streams (Repair, Democracy’s Architecture, Living Designs,
Planetary Frame, Democratic Economy)
• Specifies evaluation benchmarks (translation, authorship, durability, scalability)
• Functions as a long-term “research compass” and internal design document
Think of it as:
The Civic Architecture field’s scaffold – a design plan that structures what gets built, why, and
how.
�� How They Are Related
The Inventory = What Exists
The Research Program = Why It Exists and Where It’s Going
▸
▸They are structurally connected like this:
Purpose Inventory Research Program
Records what’s built �� ��
Explains why it’s built �� ��
Shows current institutional reach �� ��

Purpose Inventory Research Program
Defines field-level architecture �� ��
Lists outputs and partnerships �� ��
Articulates long-term theory �� ��
Anchors external credibility �� (for funders, partners) ��
Anchors internal coherence �� ��
�� One-Sentence Summary
The Inventory shows what Civic Architecture has built; the Research Program explains
why it was built, how it fits together, and where it’s designed to go next.
They are two halves of the same system – the external presentation and the internal design
logic of the field.
If you like, I can write a formal linking statement or embed alignment language in either file.