4 titles
Civic Design
The method and its tools: designing relationships, collaboration and shared capacity — not just spaces.
See titles →We are not interested in what is new. We are interested in what it reveals.
We publish on the infrastructures that shape public life: who owns them, how they are governed and what forms of life in common they make possible.
01
The questions
Every title, podcast or course starts from at least one of them.
- 01
What happens when the infrastructures of public life move into private hands?
Platforms, clouds, payments and AI change democracy through ownership, architecture and incentives, not only through content.
- 02
Democracy is not only a system of government. It is a lived infrastructure.
It depends on spaces of encounter, habits of trust, civic organisations, time and care.
- 03
What kind of spaces let us stay in contact with difference?
Democracy needs more than agreement: it needs places where disagreement and recognition remain possible.
- 04
Can open protocols sustain civic life better than closed platforms?
We look at protocols as political architectures, not only as technical standards.
- 05
Who controls the control plane of public life?
As AI agents enter institutions, power moves to the layer that connects data, permissions and decisions.
- 06
Can AI strengthen public intelligence instead of replacing it?
The collective capacity to understand shared problems and act on them.
- 07
What is the relationship between food, city and democracy?
Food is a democratic infrastructure: land, labour, care, markets and public space.
- 08
What forms of civic life exist before they are called democratic?
Mutual aid, culture, neighbourhoods, cooperatives: invisible democracies we want to make visible.
02
Collections
The questions come together in four collections.
1 title
Living Democracy
Democracy as something we do: everyday actions, civic experiments and communities reclaiming public space.
See titles →4 titles
Metacívica
How we inhabit a world that is physical and digital, local and networked — and who governs the infrastructures in between.
See titles →1 title
Human & Tender
Leadership after heroics: attention, care, facilitation and doubt as part of the civic craft.
See titles →
03
How we work
A small publisher with international reach.
- We write in the open. Many ideas start as series in the Journal and become notebooks and books.
- We frame and refine each project with the people who propose it: focus, format, editing and launch.
- We do not fund projects. What we bring is editorial judgement, production and international promotion.