Democracy for Complex Settings: Lessons from Megacities

Living in a massive urban agglomeration is a daily reality for approximately half a billion people globally, and the near future for almost twice as many (Labbé & Sorensen, 2020; UN DESA, 2018). For inhabitants of cities such as Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing, Dhaka, Osaka, Los Angeles, or Lagos– usually called megacities – daily reality is both intense and full of tension. While many of these cities have world-class infrastructure and luxurious shops, they also accommodate some of the most extreme forms of poverty and deprivation. Their scale, the intensity of the living they offer to the inhabitants, and their governmental complexity are unprecedented in human history. And yet, the topic of inhabitants navigating the political life of megacities remains remarkably absent from democratic theory. The lack of democratic concern in megacities is surprising, given that many of the challenges that their inhabitants face are symptomatic of broader social and political changes. While democratic theory broadly argues that citizens should be rulers of the political settings they are part of, politics has become increasingly difficult to understand and influence. Citizens commonly do not have enough resources, knowledge, or even time to politically engage (Elliott 2023; Dacombe and Parvin 2021). They also need to navigate an entangled and polycentric institutional set-up where it is far from clear which decisions and which actors have an actual influence on the outputs (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). They need to select and rely on unreliable sources of information, often involving distortion or even blunt lies. Taken together, these challenges mean that citizens in democratic settings are often drifting within the political settings instead of effectively ruling them. Indeed, there is no indication that the social world will become simpler, but rather, more likely it will continue to become even more complex. The 21st century has been labelled as a century of complexity when, due to progress in technological development, it became virtually impossible to avoid complexity in daily life (Rzevski 2016). Complexity is a characteristic of most large political and social settings as well the feature of major political challenges. This chapter argues that is possible to employ the life in megacities to inform democratic ideals in complex settings. First, it proposes the study of megacities as settings that are governmentally complex and impenetrable for many of the citizens living in them. Second, it develops a new way of thinking about democracy in complex settings, understood as the presence of conditions that enable citizens within political settings to navigate them and to reach their goals. Third, it advances the study of complex settings focused on what can be observed by the actors embedded within these settings, their own actions, and the reactions of other actors in those settings. The final part of this chapter concludes.