Public Assembly and Future Visions

The new statesman . What is the relationship between politics and the built environment, between the spaces inhabited by the public and the policies that govern them. From parliaments to monuments, from open squares to closed-off palaces, there clearly is a connection, but how that manifests itself remains deeply contested. For some, the glassy structures of modernity reflect ideals of transparency and openness, and town squares have embodied democratic ideals by making room for protest and debate. Meanwhile, the classical behemoths of the past have been said to represent hierarchy and, at its worst, fascism. I'm Tanjil Rashid, and you're listening to the New Society from the New Statesman. For today's episode , I sat down with the political philosopher Jan Werner Müller, whose latest book, Street Palace Square, The Architecture of Democratic Spaces, investigates this relationship between places , people and politics . Jan Werner Muller, thank you so much for joining us here at the New Statesman. Um your book explores the relationship between democracy and the built environment , essentially the relationship between politics and architecture. And there are places one might traditionally begin such a story, maybe the agora in Athens. But you open your book with Louis Khan's Parliament Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Why did that building become such an anchor for your book? It's partly because it is a recent example of a building that in the eyes of local observers really was like an agent. You sometimes hear people say it's the building that brought us democracy. Now, on one level, that can't be quite right, because buildings don't bring democracy, they don't guarantee democracy. Nevertheless, there's plenty of evidence that people felt it was an incredibly strong symbol of democracy, also a symbol of nation building. And since Bangladesh, to put it very politely, hasn't always been a democracy in the last couple of decades, it's also interesting that so many people remarked that during darker times politically it reminded people of democracy or, as some have even put it, it was like a political conscience. That's a very striking thing to say. And that sort of for me reinforced the sense that yes, the built environment by itself cannot guarantee any political outcomes, but it can play an incredi bly important role in representing democratic ideals and maybe sometimes also practically facilitating the performances that are necessary for democracy, debating, protesting, etc. I mean it's such a strange story this this parliament building in Bangladesh, because it was actually originally commissioned and started to be built long before Bangladesh had even become independent, and then the building was completed as Bangladesh finally attained some uh uh attained its freedom. So the building somehow sort of um embodied the wishes of the people and it's also called the house of the people. I mean it's such a strange kind of phenomenon of buildings uh being imbued with that kind of meaning. But you found that all over the world. It is a strange story. Uh if you tell if you tell somebody that look it was gonna be an a Jewish American architect who was gonna build this building that became so meaningful for people locally, and who also, I think it's worth adding, coined a certain kind of language of architecture, which I at least I felt I very often saw in Dhaka. So I think he really actually had a significant influence on architecture in the last couple of c last couple of uh last couple of decades. Um it does show that we basically change the meaning of buildings through different political practices by talking about buildings differently, and that a lot of buildings can be, can be repurposed. Some might not be able to be repurposed. Um I'm not quite sure that if Trump gets to build his triumphal arch in Arlington, uh there's a way of somehow making this more democratic or more more humane. So there are limits to that. But in general it is striking how even somewhat tainted buildings, politically tainted, can nevertheless, through what people do with them, how they talk about them, how they sometimes change the iconography around them, really kind of integrate them into a democratic way And one could equally say the opposite though that um a building like a parliament building like the Bangladeshi Parliament was originally meant to be under the Pakistani regime was actually kind of an empty symbol of um uh uh a pretense of democracy. Only later did it become a real parliament genuinely representing democracy. So it can you know the there can be a sort of it can be a double-edged sword in a way. I think one problem with this whole topic of architecture and democracy is that um we far too often sort of separate questions about law and human agency and what people actually do with buildings from spaces, forms, functions. And we all always have to think about them together. So when we also think about, let's say, activities like protesting, you know, what needs to happen on streets and squares, it does matter what the built environment looks like. But of course, obviously, it also matters what law allows for, what it doesn't allow for. I mean, as everybody I think knows, in the last couple of years we've seen ever more restrictions on what we can do in the built environment . Doesn't mean we can't physically do it in some cases, but in terms of what the state will do in response, it's much more dire now than it was even let's say a decade ago. And we'll get on to streets and squares in particular. Um but I want to ask you, I mean, what first drew you to the relationship between democracy and physical space? Because you're by background a a political philosopher and theorist. Um you're not known for writing about architecture and yet you c clearly are fascinated by it. I mean what w you know, how did this interest emerge? You you're right, I'm not known for it. I might now become infamous for it. Uh let's see what architects think about this. So I think when I look back, and generally I think it's far too narcissistic to look back on one's own work and, you know, start to interpret. But I think the honest answer is that probably initially it was about the move of the German government to Berlin when the question was really posed how do we signal to the world that this is a country that is strongly committed to democracy, but without simply repeating the architectural gestures from the 1950s, where many people kept saying international style equals democracy, class equals democracy. And that didn't seem quite the right approach. So interestingly, you might say, one of the things that people settled on was a chancery, which one can criticize, but which it so happens, is majorly inspired by Louis Khan. So it's an interesting sort of circular global circulation of ideas in terms of here certain shapes and forms , uh which might signal be it a certain sense of openness, be it sort of and certain interior interior design that is flexible and that can sort of open up different bulk possibilities. So I think in the y on the whole actually , the solutions that were found in the nineties were good ones. I dare say if the decision was made today, I'm not sure the solutions would be so good because we've also seen their massive regression in terms of ever more emphasis on simple reconstruction, very conservative stylistic choices, things which I think would no longer be so welcoming to sort of Louis Khan style modernism. And we'll we'll talk more about um the Reichstag building and specific buildings in a bit. Um but before we get onto that, I mean can we trace this idea to its origin? I mean, what what were the uh what were the sort of original instances of uh ex pressing democratic principles in you know in public space. You know, we talk about the Greeks and the Romans and the Forum. Could you give us a sort of rundown of of sort of the thinking around that the simple but I hope not simplistic uh version is that already in ancient Athens you can see the necessity for multiple sides. So the democracy is not just one thing. It always involves different practices . It needs one place where collectively binding decisions are made by the people themselves to the extent that they're available. Obviously, we know that in Athens you had to be a male of the right ethnic descent, etc., to qualify, but nevertheless, within that category, it was very egalitarian. So there need to be that place there need to be that place for an assembly. But you also needed the agora , which was basically a site of much more informal public opinion formation. And then around that, there was plenty of iconography that reminded people that they were special because unlike so many others, they were committed to self-government as an ideal. And interestingly, also in comparison to Rome, which of course was a republic and not a democracy, people individually sort of could make a difference and sort of act in ways as they saw fit. In Rome, only groups could really act. And there was much more emphasis on, to put it bluntly, pushing people around in certain ways and saying, yes, you have a certain agency, you make a difference if you vote, but only as a bloc, and only in highly controlled spaces and contexts. And did the architecture reflect that? Was the architecture of ancient Athens somewhat less authoritarian than the architecture of Imperial Rome? Is it can you make it? Certain ways I think yes. So one example is that in ancient Athens, when you were debating politics, you could basically sit around in a kind of arena all day. In Rome , at least the people always had to stand and were basically pushed sing a sort of single line to vote and then be done. So there was much less sort of room for interaction, for sort of forming an opinion, or even for the matter of looking at other people. If you think about, you know, there's a debate going on and you say, oh, my friend over there is a sort of specialist in this area. I'm curious what he thinks, what he looks like at the moment. All that was much more diffic ult in the Roman, in the Roman context. So it was much more like, you know, if I can be so anachronistic, you know, how we might have thought about sort of interest group politics in the 20th century, where you felt, okay, here's a large group, you know, the party pushes them around to vote a certain way, but that's basically it. There's not a lot of unpredictability in terms of what people are gonna do in doing politics. That's that's much more Roman. And in that sense, I dare say, we are still in many respects closer to the Romans with occasional nostalgia for Athens, maybe. There's this line you quote from the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmidt, on whom you're something of an expert, and he said that the Greek people's assembly sat and the Romans stood, and he thought this was an extremely significant thing, you know, the the the posture of a of a of a public um of a society. Um what's the significance there of that? So he I think at fanus uh he stole it from Cicero basically. So the Romans themselves already had some notion that yeah they were doing politics differently than the than the Athenians, and it really partly came down to this fear of if a lot of people sit around together for an extended period . You never quite know what might happen. That was one reason why the Romans, even though they were imitating Greek culture in so many other respects, were very for a long time, were very reluctant to build theaters. Because hey, that means people are just sitting around. And they might get talking and they might form factions which are not part of the official system as it as it exists. So in that sense, Greece really, again, with all the usual caveats about how exclusionary it was on some levels, was actually a much more open uh kind of kind of kind of system and one that valued individuality, including individuality in political expression and action, much more than the Romans, who of course, you know, valued that in elite actors, but not amongst the people themselves. Okay, so let's move forward to the to the present day and to some of the sort of the parliaments that we have around the world and and and what they tell us about democracy. I mean, you're here in Britain, I'm sure you've come to London many times before, but what do you think of our houses of parliament, which some call the mother of all parliaments? I mean what you know, what what what does its um design, language signify to you So I think there is room for legitimate disagreement about what a parliament should look like. Again, democracy is not one thing. It involves many different practices, as pedantic as that might sound . And different countries might prioritize different things in a democracy. So I'm not telling you anything super original if I say that if you think democracy is about an adversarial process where it becomes clear for citizens what different positions are, and where you in a sense consciously dramatize conflict, such that citizens can say, Ah, I understand perfectly what the different parties stand for, I have that acted out in Prime Minister's question time, obviously, as a prime example. That's a good thing in a certain in a certain way. And if by contrast you might think that okay, it's mainly about finding some consensus around certain questions , uh less adversarial structures, you might be more willing to go with something that is, you know, sort of more like a more like a circle. Having said that, some of us maybe are familiar with um images of parliamentarians literally beating each other up. Very often that has happened in context, which look perfectly circular, uh, you know, which seem to be designed for harmony and the outcome was different. So again, the spaces themselves do not, you know, singularly determine, determine the outcomes. But I think what remains special about Britain, and good in many ways, I would say, because it does matter to dramatise conflict. Democracy is about conflict, contained conflict obviously, but it's entirely legitimate to say, look, you can even be, you know, even be rude maybe with your with your opponents. It helps citizens to make up their minds about what is being offered to them and on what basis they should make certain choices. But what specifically about our you know, what we call the Palace of Westminster. I mean I mean w uh what do you make of a building like that? I mean that sort of gothic arch neo gothic architecture I should say, doesn't feel very demo democratic, it's certainly very hierarchical. Doesn't feel very egalitarian. Um it's very grand, imperialistic, uh it's a product of empire in a way. Um what do you make of that? It wasn't meant to look democratic. So after the the fire in the nineteenth century, was a long debate in which style to build. And at that time, it's very clear that plenty of people said classical is too much like the French Revolution, is too much like ancient ideals of egalitarian democracy. So we have to stick with something that's different. And plus, according to the proponents of Gothic, that happens to be our national style anyway. So it's also an expression of national identity. And that's why Gothic clearly, clearly won out. I don't think there's anything necessarily nefarious about reminding citizens that this is a special place. So the fact that it's grand in a certain way, that it's dignified in a certain way, I think is fine. I mean, something important and serious happens there. You know, people make decisions that are collectively binding for everybody, that ultimately are gonna authorize the state to coerce people into complying with laws. That's all fine. As long as people also can, so to speak, find their own way in. And from that point of view, Gothic actually isn't so bad. Because like Gothic cathedrals, you can have something that is very intimidating on one level. You know, we are praising God by building something that is, I mean from our point of view, it's amazing that people were able to do this with the means the means they had. At the same time, there's so much iconography that you as an individual can still find your individual way of connecting to the build ing and kind of give the building maybe its own meaning from your perspective, find your own way in. So it's not like overwhelming in the way that, forgive the cliched example, sort of gigantic Albert Speer Nazi architecture is both overwhelming and impossible to kind of find a foothold. There's no way in. There's no way in. It's it's you you are immediately reduced to one of, you know, had you built this gigantic hall in the middle of in the middle of Berlin to possibly 100,000 people, who are clearly only sort of background to some other big spectacle where you have no agency other than, well, you are sort of, you know, somebody who sits there to kind of basically embody the masses who love the leader and and so there seems to be a sort of wonderful balance between authority and the majesty of democracy, but also the the the rights of the individual and they all seem embodied in one place. So there are different parliaments that you discuss, and you know obviously we've spoken about the Bangladeshi Parliament, and another neo-Gothic um parliament that's often discussed is the Hungarian parliament. Both the Hungarian Parliament and the Bangladesh Parliament call themselves the House of the Nation, but they employ quite radically different architectural languages. You know, the minim alism of the Bangladeshi Parliament and the sort of the neo-Gothic grandeur of the Hungarian. But they're both kind of aspiring to the same thing. So so y you know, what's the difference here? And what what do these respective design languages seem to say ? Forgive the pedantic answer, but I think on one level it's very contingent. You know, w at what period does something get built, and who basically at that point, has the power to say , we want to make a st we want to make a statement about both our nation and our popular aspirations. So the Hungarian parliament was built at a time when, in the broader sense, Hungarian liberals basically wanted to make a statement, as it happens, of wanting to be like the UK in a certain in a certain way. That's why it's right at the river, that's why it's you know Gothic in a certain in a certain way. It was a way of saying, you know, we have a very similar system in in a certain, in a certain way. And I was also a slight anti-democratic gesture, so it was much more a kind of gesture towards okay, let's have a sort of highly differentiated political system, house of lords, etc. So not just like fully egalitarian in certain in certain ways. But again, it's been possible for people to basically change the significance of certain buildings and then also the spaces around them, which also matter a great deal. It's not an accident that Viktor Orban, when he came to power again in 2010, immediately said we have to basically redo the entire square around this parliament in line with his vision of Hungarian history, which made some pretty problematic statement in my statements in my in my humble view, but it was also an incredibly strong statement of saying we've won overwhelmingly and we are now going to tell you via the build environment, how you have to understand the nation and how you have to understand our history. And by the way, because you know no opposition, he thought probably will ever dismantle this, it's really also a sort of way of you know basically rubbing it in that you've won overwhelm ingly. I mean if the meaning of a building is so contingent, that is to say it changes from one time to another, what significance does it really even have ? The fact that it's contingent does not mean that whatever people do with them isn't important or that changes aren't aren't important. So especially when you think about the reappropriation of what may have seen as problematic buildings, it can be especially effective to say, look, you may think of this building this way, but look what we did to it. Look how we used the process to basically show how we've changed as a country. And a very cliched example, you might say, is the Reichstag in Berlin. Now, the Reichstag was not a Nazi building by any by any means, but was still seen as tainted and very problematic in all kinds of all kinds of ways. And now, of course, everybody loves Norman Foster's um dome, even though that wasn't actually his original. And just for just for our listeners, just if who aren't familiar with the building and haven't perhaps been to Berlin, so the Reichstag building has had uh what when was the Norman Foster um dome installed? Could you tell us about that? So there was a big competition in the 90s. Uh once the government decided that yes, it really was going to move back to Berlin . And it was clear that something had to be done with this one done with this building. And the competition was won by Norman Foster, even though his initial proposal was completely different. He wanted to do something that was environmentally very friendly, uh, and that would have basically built a special kind of roof on top of the building. The person who actually wanted cupola happened to be Santiago Calatrava. The Germans wanted Foster, and they wanted the Dome. And Norman Foster initially resisted, but somehow, you know how these things happen, si some kind of compromise was eventually was eventually found. And now people love it because you can access this particular this particular part of the building. It's extremely attractive for tourists. People like to tell a story about how oh this is glass and glass is transparency, is democracy Yes, you I mean you've been very critical of this rhetoric of transparen cy in in political architecture. I mean it's it seems like a very obvious and relatable metaphor of you know glass for transparency. But you but you're v you're very uh suspicious of this rhetoric. Could you tell us why? For two reasons. One is that um yes there's clearly a a link between transparency and accountability . And one of the promises of democratic elections is yes, you hold governments accountable. But there are really very many steps in between. And sometimes people can also be very good at using what can look like transparency in action in in bet to basically make accountability impossible. I can overwhelm you with information and I can say I'm perfectly transparent, but it will take you forever to sort out what's actually important. And so by the time, you know, we might have a moment of accountability, it's way, it's way too late. That's one reason. The other reason is that other regimes can also claim to be relatively transparent. I mean, you might disagree, but in a s in a in a bizarre way, totalitarian systems are very transparent in their own way. Here's the leader. Here's the leader. Everybody knows it's about it's about this person. Um, everybody knows roughly how, you know, the the government structures are supposed to supposed to are supposed to function. Um, so it's sort of uniquely democratic thing in and of itself to say that yes, sort of a v you know, uh political order can be made visib le or translated into a certain kind of visual order. Yes, so what you're saying is transparency transparency isn't necessarily democratic. That is to say authoritarian processes can also be quite clear and clearly uh signalled to the people, but it doesn't make it any more democratic. Um can I ask you about Trump? Because President Trump is carrying out um extensive renovations to the White House, um, and he's also pushed for uh for a return to a more kind of explicitly classical kind of federal architecture in the US and he's argued that modernist public buildings lack beauty and civic meaning. What's your take on that? So there's one thing that is strange when you think about this development. His own buildings are not particularly classical. On the inside, they very often want to be Versailles and as much gold as possible, and you know what I think critics sometimes call the Louis Le Hotel style. So that's true. That's definitely there . But I think historically by now it's plausible to say that the way this happened is that some American architects who had this agenda in favor of the classical and hated brutalism, saw a sort of opportunity at towards the end of the first term. And Trump then sort of went along with it and then became more and more invested in it because again, it's a way of showing I've really won, I'm gonna leave a mark that is going to be very difficult to, difficult to undo. And plus it aligns with this image of I'm a great developer and so on, even if that isn't really true in many, in many, in many respects. So that's one element. The other element is like with many others, like Orban, it opens up huge possibilities for corruption. Um, same mechanism as in Hungary, for instance, the government has declared an emergency or a special case of urgency to then give jobs to just one contractor without any proper procurement process. That's part of it. What's also part of it is that as long as you we put it very politely by saying renovating, as long as you keep demolishing things and engage in this sort of form of vandalism, everything is cordoned off. So primary estate , which could have served for protest, for instance, is simply not available because everything now around what used to be called the president's house is basically impossible to get close to. So So there are many, many layers of why what is happening is quite similar to what other aspiring autocrats have done. I mean you've spent um much of your career devoted to thinking about populism. And there's a strange thing happening when it comes to the architecture of um populist governments. That is to say they favor quite anti-democratic, quite authoritarian architectural styles, despite claiming to be populists. So so what's going on there? Political force So very clear answer yes and no. So I agree that populism is ultimately anti democratic, at least if you find anything worthwhile in my my approach to it. At the same time I wouldn't say that populists necessarily choose anti-democratic sty les. I think what they basically try to do with a built environment is to make good on their claim that there is what they often call a real people, which means that whoever doesn't fit that description, you know, certain minorities, let's say, or nefarious elite actress, don't truly belong to the real people. But you can't simply say this in the abstract. You have to demonstrate to people who the real people actually are. And you can use the built environment for that. So what a lot of these actors have de facto done is remove a certain layer of an architectural legacy. So again, Orban in Hungary, get rid of modernist state socialist architecture, Erdogan in Turkey also got rid of a certain modernist architecture, and then basically built in what these figures then is the style that belongs to the real people. So in Erdogan's case, Otoman Selchuk. In the case of Orban, a certain traditional Hungarian plus a little bit of Habsburg style. In the case of Modi, maybe less, maybe less, the buildings in Delhi, which often have been justified with a very technocratic language, but of course basically removing mosques and then saying, okay, and the true India is of course basically Hindutva, and we're going to build stuff that aligns with that vision of the real India and the real people. So I want to ask you about the uh one of the other prongs of your book, um, streets and squares. Um why do governments democratic or authoritarian remain so anxious about public assembly? And what do streets and squares tal us about that? I think there are deeply rooted anxieties about people getting together and then the authorities not being sure about what's gonna come out of that. This used to be a very established genre, for instance, in the 19th century, book after book, bestseller after bestseller about crowd psychology and how the masses were so irrational, always ready to be seduced by a great demagogue, also very clearly always coded as feminine. We've seen the return of some of that. In a supposed age of populism, this sort of notion that, oh, that's all about the masses being out there and falling for the great demagogue, we have seen a lot of a lot of that. So I think that explains some of the some of the anxieties. Less obvious ly, people assembling is not just about protest. Protest can look very radical, but almost by definition, those who protest ultimately accept the existing authorities and basically tell the existing authorities , we want certain changes, but we accept the legitimacy of the state as it as it is, because the addressee of the protest happens to be the state. What if they want to overthrow the state? Then they wouldn't protest. They would simply they would simply I think do something that either is that's the distinction I'm trying to introduce something like prefiguration where you basically say we want a different world and we want to use assemblies to show what a different world would look like. This is what some of the protagonists of Occupy, for instance, said. It wasn't about demands. It wasn't about, oh, let's regulate Wall Street in a different way. We weren't talking to the state at all. We were talking amongst ourselves about how you could have self-organizing communities. So I think this complicates this image because protest, you know, can look very radical and can get violent for sure. Prefiguration can sometimes look very hippie-ish in a certain way, doesn't look radical at all, but in a sense, can be much more radical in the original meaning of radical, as in going back to the roots, actually maybe wanting a totally different political system. And states can also get very nervous about that, because even though there don't seem to be any sort of drastic demands, they seem Aaron Powell I mean this is very interesting. I mean uh if you take a um a very famous square like Tiananmen Square and the protests that took place there, so you would say that implicit in those protests was an acceptance of the communist government at the time? I'm reluctant to answer because I don't claim to be an expert on this period. But my understanding is that yes, basically a lot of the students got inspired by, let's say, relatively moderate members of the regime initially. So it wasn't it wasn't obvious that okay, we want something necessarily completely different, uh, but we want something that, you know that is more free and more democratic and so on. And then they and then, of course, you know, basically the authorities panicked at a certain at a certain moment and it looked embarrassing vis-a-vis Gorbachev and and and so on. But in that sense, it it can be difficult to read how certain again, that's what I'm trying to say. It's difficult for authorities to read which way an assembly is gonna go. And because of that, sometimes authorities might precisely overreact. Yeahah, ye. I mean i i in recent in recent decades um we can sort of tell the history of so much political unrest through these public squares, Taharo Square, the Euromaidan in in in Kiev. Um what w is do you think there's something essentially uh radical about these spaces or or not? It depends what you do in them. So in Tahir for instance, many, many different groups came together. I mean can be sing can sound slightly kitschy, but I think many observers in retrospect said look, this was partly about negotiating a new social contract for Egypt. And very, very diverse actors were there, could coexist peacefully, were self-organizing in many ways. And that again seemed a prefiguration of a different country, which as we all know didn't really come to didn't really come to pass. But you can also have assemblies which are much more closed, much more homogeneous, which are really just about building collective power where you kind of have to fall in line eventually. If you don't fall in line, you might be excluded. So that can also happen. And squares do enable somewhat different configurations of assemblies. That's not not totally irrelevant Whether you might feel you're getting lost on too big a square, or whether you have something that is maybe more differentiated, allows, let's say, a group to break out into different groups that can then discuss, discuss by themselves the good examples for that too. So the build environment can be used in different in different ways, depending on what people really, really want to really want to do on those occasions. to the parliament. That is to say you have these two spaces where you can affect political action in different ways, the Parliament um or the public square. And the one um is you know makes the case for sort of incremental uh change and the other is making the case essentially for revolutionary change. You do do you do you think that's a um uh that makes any I'm gonna sound like a broken record if I say it depends. So different spaces can serve different functions, but both need to be there. That's the important thing. And that we already talked about in the case of ancient Athens. You do need that specific site of collectively binding decision-making, and you need this more diffuse public sphere, which can also involve streets, and which then can also basically enable different configurations. So it can enable protest marches, it can enable something that again authorities have been very nervous about, like encampments in the last couple of years, which can serve prefiguration and people kind of get together, they discuss , they might kind of imagine a different different kind of world. But it all needs to be there. And that is one of the reasons why it's worrying to see in so many countries, you know, thinking about the UK, the Public Order Act, states basically clamping down more and more on that informal part of basically spaces where citizens can freely exercise their basic communicative rights in a democracy. Can I uh end by asking you um about the future of the relationship between democracy and uh and the built environment? Um I mean a project which sort of purports to offer a future vision of this is um the line in Saudi Arabia. Um what do you think that represents ? So many words. Yeah. So many things. Um but I'm glad we have three hours left to uh to get into some of the uh m most important points. Look, I mean the line was a globally successful PR campaign because so many people ended up hearing about it. The idea that you could have a linear city, not a new idea, has been around since the 19th century, but has rarely really been built. To basically plant this idea of a futuristic city in the middle of the desert, which also claimed to be super environmentally friendly. Also sort of projected an image of cultural diversity. If you looked at some of the material that was put out there, you would have thought, wow, this is now the global hub of hipsters and you know the most creative people in the world and so on. Um and then of course by now we know that it it hasn't happened, and the way it looks now, it's not going to happen. And yet it probably already changed the image of Saudi in the in the eyes of many people. And then again, going back to our initial question about what sort of the built environment can do, of course some people then also eventually observe that, well, a linear city really lends itself to control by the authoriti es in a very particular way. Because to be, so to speak, in the line, in the project, you really have to stay in line as well. So despite all the propaganda about openness and diversity and so on around the people, also I think on one level realized okay this is a fairly authoritarian shape in certain ways. And it's actually gonna be virtually impossible to imagine something like spontaneous protest in a space like this. There's there's no squares. Transportation basically has to be one long train, uh, very easily controlled in a certain in a certain way. So sometimes regimes put out certain messages and they don't always realize that the message also contains some truths about them that they're not so keen to emphasize. And after all your travels and your research, I mean did you come away with a place that seemed to you to signify the best of what, you know, what uh a future society could be in terms of the relationship between democracy and and and public space. So, you know, what was the most um moving and most democratic place that you visited? I hate to disappoint you, but I'm I'm very reluctant to issue any lists now in terms of these are the top ten democratic spaces you must see in your life. Here's the bucket list By way, if I may. So I think the the place that impressed me, but also it's a place of sadness, is indeed Tahir, because we know what happened there. And personally it just became very obvious as I was moving around the space, just how restricted it is now. Even as a completely, you know, obviously harmless, harmless person, you can't even go anywhere close to what has been erected as a new iconography, which supposedly is about honoring the revolution, bringing people together and and so on. Plus plenty of you know what people call hostile architecture, so things that look nice, but that actually are ways of making assembly very difficult, because you plant trees or you do all kinds of other things, which make certain forms of conduct very difficult. So it's a very melancholy place. It is a very melancholy place. I was there in 2011 and the story that's unfolded since is uh hardly very inspiring. Um Jan Werner Müller, thank you so much for for joining us here at New Statesman. You've been listening to the New Society from the New Statesman with me, Tanjil Rashid, and my guest, Jan Werner Muller. This episode was produced by Kathryn Hughes. The podcast will be back next week.