Liminal Dialogues

This is a conversation between Gabriele and Nicolas about San Marino’s new association agreement with the European Union, asking whether the world’s oldest surviving republic is still a live player, why microstates could serve as sandboxes for territorial statecraft, and how a small university could become an engine of governance, sovereign talent and research. You can read the full case study on San Marino here.

[00:00] Nicolas: Okay, Gabriele, let’s talk about San Marino. You just published a case study on the Liminal Substack on San Marino and current events there. Why don’t you start by walking us through what that case study is about and maybe what are some of the key takeaways?

[00:25] Gabriele: Yeah, so today, as we are talking, literally, San Marino is signing an agreement with the European Union for single market access and, of course, adopting some of the law, but not becoming a part of the EU. And as soon as I found out about it, I was very curious to dive deeper into that. San Marino is often taken as this ancestor case study of many of the territorial statecraft experiments at many levels, as this very old surviving republic, and they’ve been surviving through diplomacy. They’ve never really been big enough or had enough hard power to establish themselves. And it seems like it’s also been a long tradition in the Republic of not adopting that as a strategy ever, even when they were more comparable to surrounding powers in terms of size, which is really not the case today.

And so this was the latest diplomatic move, a decision that, after almost 150 years of being surrounded by the Italian kingdom and then the Italian republic, opens a new era of different international relations: more multilateralism, but also access to a bloc. They have been de facto in the bloc through Italy as a proxy for a long time, but now they are directly part of that. So that was the reason to get into this case study.

And actually, it revealed itself to be a much, much more interesting deep dive than expected into how the times leading to this moment have changed the Republic, changed its economy, and are putting it in a moment in which many of the key questions that we have also been exploring, that of research and the university at the service of a polity, but also industrial and economic policy and the productivity of the territory, are coming to be the most crucial questions the Republic has to answer through governance in the next few years. And so the case study really tried to outline what led San Marino here. But now also, which is maybe what’s more interesting to discuss today: how do we see if San Marino is a live player capable of good governance over the next few years? Because right now we can say they signed an agreement. It’s very difficult to do an evaluative analysis of whether it is good or bad for the Republic. But I think it is a good test to see if the oldest surviving republic, it’s been 1,700 years according to their own tradition, is still a live player today.

[03:38] Nicolas: Yeah, I mean, there are several layers there, but maybe let’s start with discussing a little bit. It might not be a super well-known reference to some, especially people outside of Europe. But one of the, I would say, main takes of your piece is the idea that by signing this new agreement with the European Union, San Marino, which is an enclave state, right? It’s surrounded completely by only one other nation, which is Italy. It is somehow acquiring something. Since the unification of Italy, San Marino finds itself totally surrounded by one neighbour. And so to some degree, its sovereignty, or most of its relations, require a very careful diplomatic relationship with Italy. What is it, also for those that don’t necessarily understand European politics and the role of these associated members like San Marino, what is it that’s a win for them in taking on an additional level of, or maybe handing over an additional level of decision-making to the European Union, or complying, let’s say, maybe is the right term, with a much greater number of regulations than perhaps they do today?

[05:18] Gabriele: I guess there are two angles from which you can answer this question. And although it might seem like renouncing, giving up sovereignty by San Marino and accepting its fate in this world of giants in geopolitics, by adopting the regulations of the European bloc without even having the right to vote, I think there’s actually a historical pattern of San Marino using alliances and friendship with stronger neighbours against, generally, other stronger neighbours, or to preserve its independence in between these bigger polities. And there is this pattern which makes the European agreement make a lot of sense, especially if you look at the time since the agreement of mutual friendship with Italy in 1862, which was the start of a very asymmetric and very unipolar relationship with the only neighbour left, which is Italy.

And San Marino doesn’t have sea access. And actually, they don’t have sea access because they refused the opportunity to have it. For example, when Napoleon offered them to annex part of the territory that leads to the Adriatic Sea, they rejected that because they didn’t want to risk becoming partisans in Napoleon’s wars of conquest in Europe and therefore receiving a backlash, which would have come in Vienna in 1815. And they’ve always used this neutrality approach, in a way. But since the Italian unification, they haven’t been able to do that. And there have been cases, when they tried to open casinos, when they had a communist government in ‘57, and then after that with the banking crisis, in which that multilateral diplomacy was not possible anymore. And I think that’s actually what they are doing now, by giving up the unilateral discretion of Rome for the rules of Brussels. Even if it gives them less agency, it actually gives them much more independence and ability to negotiate in the European context than the relationship with Italy, which can just cordon the border and decide for the Republic.

[07:47] Nicolas: Yeah, and maybe let’s get into some of the things that fascinate us, or why this story of European politics is perhaps something that has captured us so much recently. What’s really interesting, of course, is that San Marino is about the size of your average municipality, or at least your average Italian municipality, those municipalities that surround it. And so it really is a city-state. And it really does have this interesting relationship between its sovereign dimension and the territory that it governs over. And I think that maybe a discovery or a connection that we made, and that you made in writing this case study, is that San Marino presents a lot of the same challenges that we’ve seen in individual municipal contexts. There might be development challenges, right? There might be challenges related to the capacity of the territory, the human capital, being able to retain and attract business or other kinds of assets to the territory. But somehow it is sovereign. Not sovereign in the way in which a great power is sovereign. Of course, as you said, it’s a much more delicate, diplomacy-centric project by virtue of its small size relative to the average state today. But it does retain a decision-making capacity that, of course, a simple municipality in a larger country doesn’t.

And so I think the question, or maybe the exciting revelation of having returned to San Marino after so many years, is that these are places where exercises in territorial statecraft and territorial transformation can be especially fruitful and productive, right? Because the reality is San Marino does hold more levers over how it can change things like its industrial policy or things of this sort. You touch upon it in the article. But also, we can see the impact of that at a very local level, right? We can actually see an industrial policy written for a single territory and see its impact over, whatever, five or ten years, in a way that a municipal government really can’t pull off. So maybe why don’t we go into a little bit of that. What are your thoughts on that? I know there are a few things in the article.

[11:04] Gabriele: Yeah, I think it’s also from the perspective of having done research in very similar environments, geographically, culturally, and also in terms of the pressures that are now facing a particular territory or polity. I would say that a lot of the research that we have done is in territories that are in some ways comparable to San Marino in their history, although they differ in the amount of sovereignty and local governance capacity that they have retained in the past two millennia. What we see in San Marino is a case in which the community, or the city in the sense of its citizens and the territory and the people inhabiting it, are very much still governing themselves at the highest level of decision-making that is available. San Marino is in the UN, San Marino is in the World Trade Organization. It’s governing a very small territory that is at the natural scale, if there is such a scale, I mean, that’s debatable, of a polity and the ground it survives from.

And at the same time, it is an example of such a system being able to determine things for itself. Even just the adhesion to the EU has been a much-discussed thing in San Marino, and I won’t enter into the politics of it, but it is an independent adhesion from a very small and very close, tight community, which I don’t think we see in many other places. And I would say that this is exciting because those are the people that are impacted by any policy. Those are the people that can shift or respond to the issues of today, and of our civilization today, that we have been trying to tackle in territories in which the people do not have that agency. And I think the key question in a lot of our projects has been: where do you find the agency to solve this particular problem in this particular territory? And the answer has always been, well, there’s a long process to get to the actual place of agency, which is in Rome, which is in a ministry, which has other benefits. Of course, it’s not like the perfect polity is necessarily the city-state. But in San Marino, those things are very much two doorsteps away.

[13:41] Nicolas: Yeah, somehow, if you get to the right levers to make, let’s say, structural transformations to the incentive systems of a territory, normally, even in a place like Italy, if you’re able to get there and actually do interesting work there, I would say it incentivizes you, to some degree, to work at an extremely high level of abstraction, because you start to work at a scale where there are just so many conditions, so many actual places that are downstream impacted by it. And also the work is just distant from the people, from the problems, right? And so you get to do a certain kind of work, right? Whereas if you are doing the local work, you hit up against a series of structural dysfunctionalities of the larger, let’s say, system that this place is not able to click with, right? The fragile territory is usually ill-suited to the incentive systems that regulate it, because it’s part of some sort of larger economy that maybe it’s not well positioned to capitalize on, or a whole series of situations that don’t necessarily work for it.

And so, when we’ve been thinking about all this territorial statecraft stuff, our fundamental approach has been: wherever we’re starting from, whether it’s the first time we work on a topic or in a place, or the tenth, right, we are able to put together some sort of partnership that brings all sorts of resources to bear. Some of those resources are economic, some of those resources are political will, a sort of social access to a series of actors, willing organizations that are looking to change their processes, et cetera, et cetera. And we scan that and we say, okay, what are the levers that are here? What are the highest-impact processes that could benefit from a certain level of protocolization? And then we proceed to perform this experiment, right? And we really think of it as an experiment precisely because of the relationship between the scale at which we need to work to learn how to solve a problem, relative to the very large scale at which broader incentive systems are modified in a place like Italy.

And so, in a way, I think the exciting idea of, for example, what a microstate can do, particularly one that is part of the European context, culturally and geographically, is that, yes, it’s not this giant country with enormous resources and enormous influence, but it is a country with all sorts of resources and influence that the local scale doesn’t have, and it does have a local scale. And so it looks like you could, in theory, right, in a place like San Marino, experiment with ways of doing things slightly differently, with higher-level levers, much faster, right? And you could get processes of action and reaction between a policy, or some sort of protocol change, and its impact, and people’s perception of it, all very immediately.

San Marino is one of the oldest, if not maybe the oldest, continuous republic still standing. There are these very old structures that many would say, okay, well, they’re ill-suited for the present, but it’s sort of cool that a Liechtenstein or a San Marino, or even a Vatican State, which is a totally different sort of thing, exists. But in reality, what we’re saying is these almost have the potential to be territorial, I don’t know, sandboxes is the word. They can actually figure out how to solve things really fast, in ways that the rest of Europe could really benefit from understanding. Because then, once you’ve actually verified it locally, once you’ve actually pulled on some interesting levers and been able to really build a strong local level, I don’t know, industrial policy is one of the examples that you advocate as really high value in a place like San Marino, if they can do that, then all of a sudden we really understand what a place like that would need from a European-level or a national-level incentive, right?

[18:39] Gabriele: Yes, and I think the key thing is that San Marino can offer, in a sense, their agility, the speed of their government, the closeness to the territory and the people. It can really show, in larger, more nested governance systems like Italy but also generally in Europe, examples of strategies that can then be employed in the neighbouring countries, in similar political, geographic and economic conditions, in systems that are much slower to reform or much slower to adapt a new policy.

And so that’s why I think it’s very interesting to observe San Marino as a case study, because it can offer examples of governance at a territorial scale that are much more difficult to produce in a place like Italy, in which local experimentation has limits to certain domains and has limits of speed, of resources, of access, that are by design in the structure of the republic, which has limited subsidiarity. And there are other examples of it. I think Switzerland is also a place where a lot of that is happening, but it’s interesting to see how San Marino now enters much of the regulatory environment that the neighbouring countries are also subject to, and so offers an interesting controlled environment in which the freedoms that it has left will, I think, be of teaching on how to use them in other instances.

[20:31] Nicolas: Yeah, I mean, I think so many people think of the microstate as a thing unto itself, and I think your case study has made it so clear to me that it’s not. Because so many people speak of the idea of small communities or small territories as laboratories that, yes, might have a small impact if you think of it relative to other things, but they can actually incubate solutions. But I think the truth is we’ve seen very few examples of that, even personally. Actually, the one that I can think of that is really unbelievable in the Italian context is Castel del Giudice in Molise, which I was just at, where I just did that presentation on land abandonment at the recent congress in Frascati, the recent event. The mayor was there, and we had met him, or met his administration, when we did Rebuilding the Edge, and seen the whole case of Castel del Giudice. But I saw the update like five years later, let’s say, just recently, and it is really unbelievable how they’ve been able to try things that no one else is able to get done.

And they’re a population of like 400 people, but the legal mechanisms they’ve been able to use to solve things like, for example, the whole issue of land and real estate, urban real estate whose owners cannot be found, and how you actually take that property and put it back in use by other actors, are quite interesting. But when you look at that case, it’s sort of like, okay, this is a municipality that really is demonstrating that certain things are possible in the Italian context, for example, and they are doing all this insane work that almost no one else would do unless they were attached to the place, because the amount of effort for the potential real impact of the moves, right, like being able to put back in use a few houses in the historic centre of Castel del Giudice, is ridiculous. It takes this extraordinary amount of faith, right, that’s really hard to do outside of a context where you have a little bit more decision-making capacity.

Because I think when you start talking about sovereignty or autonomy, it becomes kind of like you’re looking at different things, right? But sovereignty is always a gradient, right? There is a level of autonomy that an individual or a community or a place or a country has, relative to the soft and hard forms of power that they’re able to hold. But if you think of it more like a gradient, and even Europe, which is a continent that is made up of very different kinds, dimensions and histories of what it means to live and govern a place, then again, the micronation is really interesting because you can do what, you know, the microstate, sorry, you can do what Castel del Giudice is trying, but with an acceleration and with a form of leverage that is unbelievable. And I think that somehow in a continent that is so interested in subsidiarity, and where there is such a long tradition of subsidiarity, these are, to me, kind of gems. And I think the institutions that are able to really take advantage of that positioning, that can see it as a strength and not a weakness, are definitely positioned to play an outsized role in their broader contexts.

[24:35] Gabriele: Yeah, and I think there’s an interesting connection here between your case study on Siena, in particular the university, and what San Marino is doing now. Because in a way they have two main challenges, in my opinion, and that’s what I argue in the case study. One is that, now that they have restricted their freedom of action in governance in certain aspects that are legislated by the European system from now on, they need to focus on leveraging really well what they do have left of freedom, while at the same time not falling back in places that can damage the relationship with neighbours. Like the banking, which was a core industry of San Marino for the longest time before 2008: it was untenable as it was, and it became with time unacceptable to Rome, which had the upper hand. So at the same time, this delicate diplomatic balance transfers to these new domains. But San Marino does still hold freedom in those, and those are industry, research, its manufacturing base, how that’s treated.

And there are already niche actors in the republic that I think are well positioned to become really core players of its system. Those are the relatively young innovation ecosystem and startup ecosystem that we’ve been working to build and focusing on, also with some really interesting regulations that are a bit further ahead than Italy, for example on blockchain. But also the university, because they have a university which is young, especially compared with the Italian universities that often have centuries, and Bologna has almost a millennium of history behind it and is the main university of the region. It actually has campuses also in Rimini and in the Italian cities that are very close to San Marino. They now have a university, it’s growing, and has maybe around two thousand students, from the last numbers I saw, and a new course in European studies, which very much tries to train the people that are going to be in government in this new geopolitical context of the republic.

And I was wondering how you see the connection with Siena, and what would you expect from the republic if it was to take a live player approach to territorial statecraft in the use of its university as an engine of government, like government talent and research?

[27:48] Nicolas: Well, I think the interesting thing about the Siena case is, you know, that case is basically about the University of Siena, which is quite an old university as well. We won’t go through the whole history, people can take a look at the article, but it is actually born out of a series of, let’s say, feuds or problems at universities around it, like the University of Bologna, because universities during the late medieval period had all sorts of incentive-system problems with how they were financed and, by virtue of that, how education took place. In the case of Bologna, it was a university started by students, where students paid the faculty, and that of course created, I think, a tradition that is still alive in Bologna a thousand years later, of very active student political activity and involvement in how the university works.

But I think the interesting thing about the Siena case is that Siena had forms of leverage that were a little less hard, let’s say, than some of its neighbours; Florence, of course, is the typical case. So they needed other things to prop themselves up and defend their city, their city-state. One of these, of course, was having great lawyers. To simplify a little bit, of course, it’s not exactly like we think of it today, but have great lawyers. And so they needed people that really understood all sorts of things, for which they needed to be highly educated, and then they also needed, of course, to live and work at the service of Siena. And so they were able essentially to pull really talented faculty to Siena from other places at a couple of moments and start a university that was, I don’t know, for me it’s kind of like the first state university.

Because somehow they had this very cool incentive system where the faculty was paid by the communal government, so by Siena. And Siena financed the faculty by charging a tax on student housing. So if you had a student, if you rented to a student, you had to pay a special tax, and there were all sorts of wealthy students that went there. And you used that money exclusively to pay the faculty, right? So the faculty to some degree was good at generating enrolments. Of course, that generated greater taxes, which was to the benefit of the way the university worked and of the republic itself. But the student didn’t really control the faculty, let’s say. So there was a way in which the republic could evaluate whether a faculty member was providing value to the university and to the republic, by virtue of understanding his attendance and all these sorts of things, but it wasn’t a vector of the yoke of the student that he was supposed to teach. And so you eliminated this potential for faculty constantly pandering to the student, as was one of the issues in Siena [sic].

But really, they had all sorts of departments. They also had a big medical department, because that was attached to pilgrimage routes and helping the pilgrims that would come on their way to Rome and stop in Siena, which was one of the big stops. And so there was a very interesting co-development of theory and practice in Siena, because the university was incentivised to cultivate fields for which they actually had the practical necessity. This produced all sorts of capacity building and innovation on the territory, where great theoretical advances could be made, but they were made out of being engaged with the practice: for example, with the practice of caring for the ill that were moving through the pilgrimage routes, and so creating medical innovation and training doctors for that purpose. So it’s a very beautiful example, I think, of what we think of as an ARO, an applied research organization, and what it can do, and how you can build an incentive where a benefit to the territory can be aligned with intellectual pursuits and research and education whose impact goes much broader than what the territory itself can capitalise on.

I think that, relative to the San Marino case and the university, what I was thinking when you were talking was: what is the population of San Marino? It’s like in the...

[33:00] Gabriele: 30k? No. 34.

[33:03] Nicolas: 34,000, right? So, you know, the math was done differently back in Athens, but it’s not a size dissimilar to, I think, the ancient Greek city-states. And if we think of the productivity of those places, it’s just extraordinary, right? What you could do with a population of about 34,000, I think about 30,000 citizens is the number. It’s obviously clear that you can do extraordinary things, right? We live downstream from all of that history. But I think the question is how. And certainly the idea of having a very cultivated population, with grit as well, is an important part of it.

But in modern senses, I think the example of the university that you were giving is essential, because I think the university in San Marino has already been making an effort to onshore the education of its citizens. If I understand correctly, the numbers might be small, but the percentages are high in terms of how much they’ve been able to raise the retention of the Sammarinese, to actually stay and study in Siena [sic] instead of going to Bologna or wherever it is that they go to study. And so onshoring that, I think, is a first step, because then you’re trying to train people that already have this territorial attachment, which is much more important than [inaudible] generational, let’s say. But then being able to provide the right competencies to those people, and then connect them with the right opportunities that policies can produce, is really the key, right? You need the university [to be] a very serious live player, in terms of: it has to be able to attract, being very small, some of the best, and then be able to connect that with industry and government to be able to retain the best.

Not necessarily because San Marino is where they’re going to make the most money or have the best or most secure job that they could in all of Europe, but actually because there’s a great project to build, because you belong to it, because you’ve seen excellence within the realms of your city-state, and you’ve seen innovation, and you’ve seen great research, and you’ve been able to work with great people, right? And the access exists, the doors are open in industry and government for you to actually do really incredible things. And then the small opportunity of San Marino becomes, I think, intellectually and somehow even spiritually, in my view, enormous, right? And so you can retain the best of the best.

But I think for that, you need to, and I don’t know the University of San Marino or its culture, but you need to be able to allow people to get access to the level of excellence that they need to do some of the things that need to get done. And my intuition is it needs to be really narrow, because if you’re really small, you can’t bring the best minds in this or in that; you can’t actually develop deep expertise in a thousand things. It needs to be extremely strategic, knowing also that there’s no scaling. You know, when you do a story, like the Amazon story, right, it’s like, oh well, yeah, you start, you just sold books, and then you ate the world. But you start somewhere; it’s like the whole Peter Thiel’s Zero to One theory, right? That’s great, but I think that doesn’t apply in a context where, for example, a university is always going to... well, maybe that’s not true, but it’s not about size, it’s about unbelievable competitive advantage in some very niche thing, right?

[37:07] Gabriele: And I think the most interesting thing, especially in the context of what we’ve been thinking about for the last few years, is that the three key nodes of the ARO, which are the public policy; the industry and the productive components; and the research, the university and the culture, that compose sort of this triangle in which you have the government, the research and the industry in San Marino, they are so tightly knit. And the feedback loops between the research and the industry, between the research and the government, between the government and the industry, are so close to each other. And that makes it really compelling, especially because they have all of these components.

I think you have other examples of small polities that are missing some of these. Even municipalities in Italy that do have maybe some of the restricted policy-making of an Italian municipality, they do have a strong relationship with industry, they don’t have the research component, which is maybe where the ARO comes in and where a lot of effort has been put, in some respects, in connecting with the regional innovation ecosystem. But when all three are in the same place, I think the synergies that are possible are really interesting. And in addition to providing an interesting case study, they are a great opportunity for the current government in San Marino to show that their model is still very much relevant and can still very much contribute to good governance at a larger scale.

[38:54] Nicolas: Yeah, and I think that somehow, you know, there’s certainly been lots of talk, and I think maybe a mental model, of the microstate as a sort of special economic zone. And that’s fine. I mean, there’s many ways in which that has proven to be actually quite hard and create all sorts of issues. But I think what’s wrong... you can do some of that, right? You can have a bespoke... and San Marino, in your case study, has some of those qualities, right? It has some interesting incentives for startups, some interesting incentives for industry, et cetera. And that’s all important.

But I think what’s always missing about this special economic zone idea, how do you take a small place and make it produce this sort of outsized economic output, right, but there’s of course all the research and innovation that’s a part of that, et cetera, is that you need a concept or a term or a way of thinking of it that has a cultural dimension. And I think that’s what we’re talking about here. Was ancient Athens a special economic zone? I wouldn’t call it that, you know. I would think of these as places that have the advantage that yes, they do have sovereignty, they can exercise all these interesting levers, but also they have a very coherent, cohesive and long historical narrative that ties people together, right? And you don’t just make an economic incentive out of that. I don’t want to call it a playground, but you have to make it a place where you can cultivate people to be the best that they can be.

And because there is this very direct relationship between being a citizen and the governance, and being able to see that and know who governs you and being able to talk to people, and actually living in a community that has, I would say, a human-sized government, I don’t know if that’s a term, but you could know enough people that you understand actually how the government works, how the industry works, who’s who, right? You have this dimension that gives you access to building great things. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know if I’m being clear, but it’s a cultural thing. It’s not just about the competitiveness of the industry. It’s about being able to cultivate the education to have incredible citizens that can occupy positions of influence in different sectors, in the private sector, in civil society and in the government, and having that be incredibly productive.

Because somehow what’s missing today is... there are places where there are excellent people, there are places that make excellent people all over the world, of course. And there are people doing incredible things. But somehow what’s missing is places where the alignment is high between the different spheres that make a place. And so you have the technologists that are doing cool things and the businessmen that are building great enterprises that are fighting with their state governments or their regional governments or whatever you want to call them, because the incentives aren’t there. You have a politics that’s sort of trying to do something, but doesn’t understand what’s going on in technology. You have all of this misalignment. And for me, this intuition of alignment between parts of society is really valuable right now. And I think it’s an enormous opportunity for, let’s say, the microstates, for sure. Well, for sure, I don’t know. I don’t know what you think.

[43:08] Gabriele: I think, yes. I don’t know if it’s the right answer, but in a sense, I think this alignment is what’s going to show whether San Marino is capable of getting into this agreement and this new phase and keeping true to its long history of self-governance and capacity to govern itself. And it is in the integration between these three poles... and I think that hints at the fact that we might actually be seeing a longer strategy. Those are the areas in which they preserved the most autonomy, and in which they’ve been slowly positioning after the banking crisis, which completely unraveled their economy, increasing their public debt to like 60%, before it was in the 20s, and crashing their GDP at the time.

But after the recovery, the restructuring in recent years, a more stable salvaging of the remains of that world, now they are positioning for a new vision. And I hope that it is that, because if it was, I think it would provide a very convincing argument for the increased integration of these three aspects in many other territories that now really don’t have that, because of the long feedbacks and because of the detachment between decision-making and territory in many other governance structures. So I do hope that San Marino provides that argument.

[44:50] Nicolas: Yeah. And in a way, you know, the university... I think there’s a couple of confusions with the university today, or contorted transformations that are making it struggle, that somehow play in the favor of all of this. Because if you think of maybe a lot of the problems with the university today, one is it thinks it needs a certain scale, or maybe it needs a certain scale, to really thrive and survive. That scale is enormous and is based on a mass education model that is basically just not the history of the university, right? To start with, universities have usually been relatively small institutes and have done, within those small sizes, unbelievable things for humanity, single universities, right? So there’s a narrative there that you need a certain university size that I don’t think you really need to be a live player, let’s say, right? Maybe it works against you right now.

[45:52] Gabriele: Yeah.

[45:54] Nicolas: So that’s one aspect. The other aspect is that universities have become very... I think their practices have been overtaken by the practices of the American corporate sector, and of publicly listed companies. The sort of managerial takeover of universities has certainly made them much more like businesses that are providing a service somehow, or a series of services. And one of those is a social playground, right? Where people meet when they’re young and they fall in love and they find someone to marry, but they also learn how to do a trade and get a job and whatever. But it’s very much like a multinational that sells you many things, right? Where it’s a little bit indiscriminate in the why it’s doing it. Everyone can build their own path within the services that it has to offer. And everything has become, I don’t know if it’s secular, but very pragmatic, right? Why did you go study abroad? Well, because you get New York City. Why should you take this profession, or live on campus or live off campus? It’s all very like, yeah, there’s services, and different people have different needs, and you live on or off campus and you study this or you study that or whatever, right?

And I think that the most ambitious young people today, or at least in my experience, they’re not looking for that, right? They’re looking to be in the right place at the right time with the right people, in some sort of intense way, to be part of a culture and understand how a certain kind of culture lives in the world and thinks and makes things and creates value. And it really is about joining a certain kind of... it’s not like a movement, but it’s like a tradition or like a family, right? Because you want to do things in the image of that. And that, again, is what the Anglo-Saxon university, I think, was a little bit more like maybe 100, 150 years ago, right?

I think that model is somehow back. I think we’re seeing a lot of startup universities that are trying to do that, from, you know, sequester the phone for a few weeks, to everyone lives on campus, to the retreats, to the sort of out-in-the-open, let’s say, position on what we’re doing here. What kind of citizen are we training? And what is the value of an education? And how is it more than just getting a job? All of these things are starting to appear. And I think there’s feedback from the most ambitious. And all of that to me seems very aligned with everything we’ve talked about in the San Marino case: a small university at the service of a specific territorial context, focused on onshoring its students and actually connecting them to this reality, and maybe giving them more than an education for a profession, but actually more like a civic education, to be active players in different sectors of this socio-technical system that is San Marino, let’s say. That sounds really cool and really possible and, you know, hard. But I don’t see why it can’t be done. You know what I mean?

[49:45] Gabriele: Yeah. And I do think that it is exactly the thing to keep an eye on. Hopefully also the thing that can provide an interesting experiment. But I think this kind of leads us to the next episode. I think there is an interesting intersection to dive into there, in also recovering... because I think everything that you’re saying goes back to one thing, which is recovering a telos of the university, as opposed to the university as a container, a lattice of different things that just provide a space for other organisms to grow, in a way, but is not self-directed towards a goal of the institution. And actually, I would say that now it’s really frowned upon, especially in big universities, the idea that the institution ought to have a goal. And...

[50:45] Nicolas: Yeah, when you interrogate the telos, by the time that it’s done explaining, you’re like, I don’t even know what was just said. It’s like a mumbo jumbo, like a distraction answer.

[50:57] Gabriele: Or it is a very broad sort of definition that, at the end, is an over-engineering of basically saying that we’re going to focus on the competences that are not taken over, on one side by the market, on the other side by the politics of the day, but instead everything that is in between, and allows it to be a neutral substrate. We are seeing a great thirst for alternatives to that, I would say. But it also does feel like there are none that are yet established. And it will be very interesting to see an older institution, and sort of an original one, emerge as a player in that. But even just thinking about this, I think, already creates an interesting space.

[51:51] Nicolas: Yeah, yeah, just thinking about it. And I think telos is the right term, because I’ve been thinking about this in relation to archaeology for a few reasons, in relation to architecture, in relation to different disciplines where I’ve come up against the question of telos. And I think the reason why that’s the right term is because as soon as you lose the ability to actually understand what it is that you’re doing, basically, right, everything that is disruptive, particularly technology that changes the practices of an institution or of a discipline or some sort of organized thing, everything goes into chaos, because you’ve confused what you do for why you do it. And when what you do must be changed because the landscape is changing and you’re being forced to adapt, if there’s no telos, if there’s no why, then you basically die. You die on the hill of defending the fact that you as a human should be able to do this work that actually now the computer does better than you.

And actually, when you have a telos, every time a new technology, a new optimization, a new way of solving a problem comes in, you’re either excited or indifferent. Indifferent because you’re saying, well, that’s great, but that’s indifferent to my purpose, so I can’t do anything with that, right? Or you’re excited because you’re like, oh, actually, I can take that technology, I can maybe even misuse it, not use it in the way it’s intended to be used, because my telos is different and I have a vision for what I can do with that technology, right? That’s highly, highly productive.

And so I think it’s very important. And maybe to wrap it up, the telos of the university is good, but I think it’s also very tied to what we’ve been talking about: we need to flesh out the whole thinking on long-term thinking and cathedral thinking. Because I think that’s also what we’ll see: does San Marino, for example, have the ability for long-term thinking, because of all these very specific conditions that make them who they are? I don’t know the context well enough to say that, but long-term thinking feels like a prerequisite to be able to achieve any of the things that we’re discussing, right? Because without long-term thinking, you can’t build a telos that does anything even remotely close to what we’re discussing, right?

[54:33] Gabriele: Yeah, that’s a great place to wrap it up. I think we have the next appointment ready.

[54:45] Nicolas: Amazing. Let’s see how the case is received, and we’ll catch up again.

[54:51] Gabriele: Yeah. I mean, if anyone listening is in the very small demographic of people who are listening to this before they read the case study, go read the case study.

[54:58] Nicolas: Absolutely. Bye, Gabriele.

[54:59] Gabriele: Great. Talk soon. Bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit liminalfutures.substack.com

This is a conversation between Nicolas Delgado Alcega and Gabriele Pizzi starting from a practical question of attribution, examining how contemporary academic systems of credentialing, bibliometrics, tenure, and diffuse responsibility shape both the production of knowledge and the incentives of those who produce it. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis provides a contrasting institutional model in which differentiated roles, intellectual autonomy, political service, and a shared orientation toward truth permit contribution without converting every contribution into a claim on authorship. The discussion ultimately proposes authorship as a locus of responsibility rather than a reward for participation, and asks how institutions might preserve originality, excellence, and intellectual independence without collapsing their members into either interchangeable labor or competitors within a single hierarchy.

GP: Okay, well let’s get into it. Do you want to give an intro?

NDA: Yes so it’s been a couple of interesting days on this convergence of things we’ve been reading I just finished listening to this excellent audiobook version of New Atlantis by Bacon in some of these new... This recent episode from the students that we both heard on... I don’t remember what they call it, but something like academic decline basic academic apathy and a few other things right? You’ve been catching up on your friend Ahmed’s work at... In the project that’s been evolving in an interesting way. And it’s nice to go back in and see what he is up to. But then also all this collides with some of actual work and problems it brings up over the last couple of days, in particular around the topic we thought would be good to dedicate an episode diving into of authorship. Authorship in particular in relation to how it affects or what is its place in attracting maintaining and stimulating if we want to use the term from the students passionate individuals inside an institution like the one we’re trying to build.

And also I would say how it relates or maybe where this comes from at a practical level is because we have for a while been working on a more now substantive version a media apparatus of the organization maybe not in the way one would conventionally think of media which is maybe more like communications like “what are you doing on social media?” But actually in what are all the sort of communicational outputs that we produce that do two things: One of course interact with the outside world but are also the vehicles through which to give a logical form clarify problems put pressure on some of ideas results methods we have.

So those move everywhere from things like wide literature from academic publications to maybe great literature to reports that we produce after we run a challenge, to lectures and opinion pieces that are just trying to flesh something out, podcasts articles case studies you know there’s a whole series of things that have been sort of coming together as now may be less of a media theory as we’ve had in the past and tried to pursue but I realized maybe it’s not the time maybe we don’t have the resources maybe you know just thinking about it wrong. But now there’s much greater clarity all of it is starting to really serve a purpose that creates incentives for it to happen. But of course authorship inside of all of that is really important. And it touches upon again the issue so casual right we’re talking about peer review and attribution in peer review.

And then we hear the riff on the students on the topic And yeah it just felt maybe good to talk about because I think we’ve been sort of vibing it The way we have been thinking about authorship up to this point And I thought yeah we could start by actually... I’ll draw out maybe what I think are the two spaces That we’ve being vibing from And we can take it from there Yeah okay so I think the you know whenever we had to author something I was reflecting yesterday there we’ve taken on two instincts and I would call one maybe more American and one more European or you know because I think the first one is let’s say the logic of inclusion and this sort of guilt of the author in the American system at least currently certainly much more intensely a few years ago but this place from which you know I’ll maybe try to sketch out what I think it is that happens in that space it is something like postmodernism dismantles the idea of the originality of the author and makes everything into a sort of process, right? Everyone’s just some sort of actor that’s being moved by the process.

Maybe that’s postmodernist, maybe that’s a little bit of systems theory. I’m not sure, but that becomes pervasive culture on the one hand on the other. I think there’s a sort of elite overproduction that starts to create these very... These sort of classes of these members of the laptop class let’s say they start to see themselves as labor. Right? And co-opt the labor movement. There’s some really interesting academics in... The laptop class starts to see itself as labor and read everything through the lens of power That’s another consequence of I think the whole post-modernist thing There’s nothing other than power and raw Some positive or negative exchanges of power Usually negative Or some zero Let’s say And that creates A situation where Well so they start identifying as labor and everything becomes about the recognition of labor. This happens in academia as much as in the professional world right?

Everything becomes very transactional maybe this has to do with financialization and globalization of the economy as well and so even you know collaborating on something is just a transaction exchange And so it creates this sort of reading to bring it back to something very simple like who gets attributed on paper or what do we write in the acknowledgement or what did we say before we started lecture as an infinite list of thank yous where the author in the end, let’s say whenever you go give a lecture, there’s always of course an author that is authoring the lecture regardless what they’re talking about and who produced the work but it requires sort of bowing down to this endless infinite list of people that go not only to every single person on the ladder that can be identified that contributed to the work. To even you know systems and institutions and previous owners of the land in the case of America right, the indigenous land on which the work was researched and the whole thing is extremely contorted.

But I think it ultimately results in a guilt ridden, very Protestant mentality to authorship that we’re in right now. We can say that this is the reason or not to have the right or wrong description. But what we can say is it’s definitely not functional because when something as simple as putting someone’s name behind some sort of output requires all this architecture then it just tells you there’s something that we’re doing that’s kind of contorted and it’s not really meeting reality. It’s just not operating with the right truth. There’s some confusion there That’s one, right? And then the other one - and I would say that there’s a sort of mimetic reason why to some degree we’ve followed that Not that I disagree with the ways we’ve done attribution in the past but I would said comes from that With not really questioning it for 2 reasons 1 because It made sense, like on a challenge when we read a report to have Of course the leadership team and the whole research as well as our team credited on the report.

That just makes sense but I think another is just yeah the mimetic thing it hasn’t really felt very relevant to put into question what we were perceiving in a space in which these things were being received so we’re just focused on saying something else rather than questioning this sort I think premise. The other is again very like well not that we put any thought into it and then I think the other the more maybe European phenomenon is the whole bibliometric thing which happens in America too but of course we know in a country like Italy bibliometrics is a lot more we want to call it meritocratic in the bureaucratic sense right? Like jobs are made or unmade at least formally on quantities of things that have certain measurable qualities.

And so everyone that is pursuing a semi-academic track and trying to secure livelihoods and permanent rent from intellectual work are essentially trying to get as many whatever A-class publications and citations and this and that because you know these things get measured and that determines whether you can get this shotpost or the other in theory right that’s what it’s supposed to be and it creates of course the obsession with getting yourself on a paper but it also I think creates them maybe more perverse phenomenon for the question of passion.

Of creating a ladder within the academic system where we hear this a lot from PhDs in Europe where there’s sort of servitude to the faculty advisor which is supposed to be a mentor in many cases and best of cases in a system like the research university but in many cases, it is someone that doesn’t have enough time or isn’t getting paid enough to produce the work that they or doesn’t really have the passion to produce, the work they need to produce They got PhD students, the PhD students essentially pursue projects that they have again not as a mentor, working with Newton or something really interesting he’s doing but more helping produce for the faculty that is also himself trying to climb the ladder that you know that the student is trying to claim or whatnot. Or stay on top of the ladder. And the PhD is essentially sort of not only you know yeah their area of research is a little bit more restricted but we hear a lot this sort of... and we see it a lot in conferences where the advisor is always a co-op for the author or something like this.

So it’s like: you have to give me co-authorship because I am helping you or something. And maybe they are helping in the way any of us help one another, giving ourselves feedback on a piece or reviewing the report or producing the brainstorming that leads to the idea of a certain work product. That seems to be enough to be like: to put me in there. That way the faculty multiplies with little effort his bibliometric or her bibliometric. The PhD student wins the favor of the faculty. So there’s a whole system there right? And of course I think that’s another one that we... I would say you know we’re so naive about the peer review system in many ways right again not something we like too much into question other than up to now hasn’t seemed like something interesting to in some ways engage. And we can talk about why it’s worth engaging perhaps, but again just sort of follow through those regular systems.

But the problem is with taking one route or the other not is that if you’re trying to build something distinct and it has a temporal scale on which it has to exist within this in this system but it has to also do something distinct enough that it will actually work in the next system more strongly than it will work in current let’s say a system of knowledge production or yeah, the pursuit of truth. A lot of these things we take on by osmosis might actually become barriers in the future to proper performance in this next scenario that we believe will exist by the time we are ready to be an important player in. I don’t know what you think of this read. Am I missing anything in terms of what we’ve done so far?

GP: No, I agree. I think there’s a few aspects and also like there’s another aspect of this system of credentialing and credit which is that of LLMs and AI which is putting like a lot of pressure on the peer review system from what I understand especially in like a but I think its positive because it pressures exactly what you are saying so this kind of incrementalism which is necessary if the weight of most mundane tasks has to be pulled by a PhD student that pyramid structure of incremental research kind of had a reason to be not that it was necessarily like equitable but it has a functional reason of existing.

And now he doesn’t so much until it becomes this like well, it doesn’t for young people that know how to use agents probably still does for the old professor who has 1000 interns and produces that incrementalism also in the evolution of work and I think now that you can produce slop or produce research even good research incredible amounts I think we have this shift to how do we evaluate work we need little prizes along the way so you keep working for me but like for its actual value which was the idea of peer review in general it is like I’m gonna look at work not on you and then there’s a whole question who’s evaluating it actually? Is it your peer or just someone that has done enough work in their life to get to the level to be able to use the data level and enough pooling the weight inside the bibliometric system or not. There’s no qualitative peer review, which I think is an aspect. It’s quantitative because the system credentials in a quantitative way and very incremental.

NDA: Yeah. Well, and so what you’re saying is AI puts in which the production of knowledge gets synthesized when it becomes revealed that there is a huge amount of the system that is just producing the form without any of its contents or essence. And that’s produced by virtue of how cheap it becomes to do what people have been doing more expensively in the past like like, you know, like trying to, you Know, PhD students trying to get credentialed to be able to follow certain track and then whatever, like that game right and the role of the PhD student in producing the slop many times Then that puts sort of the final bomb on the thing and puts it all in crisis which crisis means actually puts them in highest mode of defensive in defense. Kind of like the Baroque period and the Counter-Reformation right? It’s probably going to get much more doubled down, much more intense because everything is being sort of thrown into question by this. And a lot of conference you were in recently on remote sensing sort of revealed it, right?

Like all thing on the last paper that you saw was just someone saying “everything we show in this conference can be done by AI” is this the best use of our tongue? Like are our contributions substantive? So it will be exacerbated, but in reality consequences are already here, which is people with real passion, again to keep riffing off the gentleman from San Francisco as a term holding sensitively by a lot of passion either exit the academy at least after maybe sometimes drop out of college to do the whole startup thing and follow that sort of narrative. But at least by a master’s level, that’s their last engagement. And it’s just clear that the best people in a way or not really staying. And those people that are incredibly passionate and follow it out are extremely frustrated. And I think they’re frustrated with the fact that they still come out with a sort of genuine energy or where the prevalence of genuine Energy given their age that they have.

But they find that it just feels like there’s just so much that needs to be done to be able to quote unquote get to where you can do the thing and they see the transformation happening to you. So I would say that a lot of... and a lot to continue on the track. That have real passion. Real creativity and real hunger let’s say for knowledge I think that they... I mean, I don’t know my experience is they would all be glad to go work at a liminal that can offer the job security of university right? Like if those two that existed like everyone would flock there right it’s kind of like the experiment at University of Austin Texas, it’s just a whole other thing, but it’s a similar thing where like, you know, like if you can just create some artificial condition in which all of a sudden, like the most been a lot of the benefits of the most consolidated institutions are available in these other institutions that are putting it onto question probably what’s left of the best but what sort of we sort of go there, right?

And so why is that which brings us back to why we wanted this episode is like because at the most basic level it’s just really annoying that you have to be caged in even something as stupid as share credit over an idea with someone who literally sat with you 30 minutes once every two months. And now they’re expected to be your co-contributors. It’s something that just feels caging to be talking about that, right? Which brings us to the question, maybe I should talk about New Atlantis, but because it brings us once that system is in a way cycled back What about these things really create the incentives to capture passion? And how do we create a reciprocity between ultimately the support that the institution gives to the individuals without caging them into for the institution.

Because even a lot of things we’ve done, I would say there is some level of support, some level ideas, time dedicated surely that the institution and its representatives both financially and in terms of time dedicate to work products of individual authors to pull up the institution, there needs to be some mechanism through which those people are somehow producing value for the institution without the institution trying to capture. I’ll add another more thing that we need to discuss really, but I feel tenure is often discussed as like the premise for free pursuit of truth and knowledge in college. Not truth anymore I would say within the university but free intellectual pursuit. And it’s just so maybe the opposite right? It’s sort of also a way in which universities really try to capture you from leaving because like intellectuals are so fickle and mobile for jobs when the job security doesn’t exist elsewhere. They make it hard for you to exit and really painful. They get your house, say this, say that.

By the time you turn around, it’s like you have to abandon your life to abandon the institution. So you are actually trapped within its incentive system. So these universities have worked very hard on this problem. The question is how do you think about that again? On how you think about a way to maximize is the collection of passionate people rather than the rent seekers. They want actually the house and job security. They’re not really interested in the work itself. But yeah, New Atlantis for me... I appreciate the recommendation. You read it recently too right? Yeah, I had read it a few months ago and this morning I went through it again Why did you send it to me? Maybe let’s do that before...

GP: Well, I mean, I think there’s a bit of the foundational text of modern academia In the sense that it was the inspiration behind the Royal Society And then a big reference in the construction of what we now for like an Anglo academia. I mean, the University of Bologna was existing for like 600 years before this but... The idea of this institution, Solomon’s House in the book that is pursuing truth through this very... Let’s rebuild the story. For those who haven’t read it The New Atlantis book by Francis Bacon tells the story of European explorers who lose their way in the Pacific and land on this island on which an unknown nation lives and they get welcomed by this person in this place. And this island is an island no one knows about it so its a secret place in which there’s the Solomon’s House which is basically an academic institution whose goal is the pursuit of truth and extension of human dominion in overall things. In describing his institution he describes the roles, the way they conduct experiments and a very modern idea of science.

This book was written in 1660s I think yeah something like that no 1626 it was published so a little bit before but a very and the original legend produces it. Very modern idea of the roles also if you go at part I’m particularly curious about what answers to some of what you’re saying is like when you go in the list of roles which is also available on Wikipedia of the new of the Solomon’s House apart from the conception of the institution itself which is on paper very same as many current institutions claim, no? -Yeah. -The new Atlantis. The roles were very interesting, but about the book, I think the interesting idea and why to read it is that you can see where the idea of a modern scientific technical, but also oriented towards basic science institution was born and in a way also how it was corrupted. And if you compare it to what is now that we consider academia. It feels very different but also I think there’s this core command of also the applied side of the science but sort of this spiritual quest towards knowledge technology conceived as human dominion over things that...

For me it’s clear that it should be the core of this academic endeavor, but then is it?

NDA: Well, human dominions, I would say there’s like a layer of access to light or I think they use “light” as this sort of He uses light as a sort of image to say like truth and God right? Like the revelation of reality as created by God. And the consequence of the more light you have access to in a way The more actually then yes you can pursue this sort of project of humanity But yeah I thought actually -- so it’s a utopia and incomplete work. Of course, I skimmed the Wikipedia before I listened to it and of course it has all this prefiguring of the Angler Research University. But I thought it was more interesting is all the ways it’s different from the research university we know like that’s what I sort of saw. And it... I’ll maybe just describe there’s something about the plot that says it all which is - I don’t know if it’s exactly like this but how I remember it- you have Bacon basically creates an event right?

So these travelers come across they’re stranded and they come across these peoples on this island The next scene is a moral alignment These people come on their boat and they basically say “Are you Christian?” “Are truth seeking or not?” They explicitly ask the question, they see how these foreigners react in values basically through a series of simple gestures. And then once this has been established they’re granted access to land. And they’re generously treated and sick or healed and all these sort of things. They’re invited to stay basically as long as they want between one thing and another but only because there’s a moral alignment right?

Which is he’s gonna tell us about the content of this society but he will first introduce the society aesthetically so a lot of words in this very short text are actually spent on description I think not just because it’s a work of fiction of course but because I think there’s something about then the aesthetics or all of the behaviors of this society that express themselves aesthetically as somehow regulators of their relationship between the real work or what they do. And then the sort of morality that they are pursuing. So he talks about people’s shoes and their belts and their robes and their hats and their movements and how people stand in a room when a certain kind of figure enters beautiful rich descriptions actually of the rituals that keep the place alive. And they keep the myth of the place live so then the work can happen in a rich and meaningful way. Then he goes into the mechanics: the mechanics of the society how it has remained undiscovered why is it so enlightened? Why is it pure? So free of sin you know And then this university is at the core.

And so I think for me that sort of arc of storytelling is perhaps what is most apparently missing in the current environments like no alignment even the aesthetics. I was listening to it when I graduated from Harvard And they gave me... I had to pick up my robe or something It was just polyester You know like it was polyester And it’s this thing The masters and PhD robes, you keep them If that’s your highest level of achieving You wear it at events Like commencements If you go and work at a university And bring the robe of your alma mater And I was looking at it I was like It’s so cheap about it right? So utilitarian. You’re probably just gonna wear this once so we shouldn’t expend too much or you shouldn’t spend too much but you have to pay for it to wear this thing and whatnot And everyone is walking around in polyester in the form of “the” sort of degraded remnant of what used to be something that had a real culture thus an aesthetic culture and material culture attached to it and thus beyond that profound moral purpose in society.

When this happened to me in undergrad at University of Miami in the Northeast. You know you always have a thing where we’re not Columbia or Harvard or something. So my first Paul Yes to Robo was like well okay I graduated in Giant Gym and it was an amazing experience at university but with these things I just thought well we’re climate change and plastics and all these things that are--and then this thing that you’re supposed to keep for the rest of your life because it’s the maximum achievement of your current maximum achievement -of your intellectual pursuits- and you should wear with pride, is this thing represents the total opposite of all the values that one could say are commonly and implicitly held within the institution. I mean it’s a little digression but it speaks to the importance of culture I think

GP: Yes, but also what you said about the values is important because they just aren’t there like they should be at the core of that if you read back on them, I think everything that critiqued can be attributed to be called by the fundamentalism of the credential process to abandonment of our belief in truth. And I believe that that is the goal of your research because if you have that, which should be the underlying assumption of science, and I think it still holds in many more quantitative fields you have to see. That’s then what produces you have a belief in truth and then that guides... you can evaluate things against sort of an aspiration and that produces also material culture that is different from a culture that doesn’t believe that you can measure things against an objective aspiration.

And it permits conflict and authorship because it permits…if there is a commonly held belief, then original ideas and positions are held to be…you can discuss them without risking dismantling the whole system when the epistemic system is weak any deviance from the sort of whatever… in this current set of mimetic positions repeated as pure mimesis is threatening because the epistemic base is weak. And so everyone’s afraid that saying the wrong thing or doing something a little bit this way or that or even over attributing importance to yourself could actually make the whole thing tumble. Yeah, I think it is also like the fact which if you don’t attribute the value of the work to something external to everyone which can be truth you you have to act like you have two right things in some way you have say what’s more important what’s less important the only thing that’s left is authority and if you have like sort of authority untangled from truth left is sort of this idea of l’anzianità. It’s like how many things have you published? How much have you gone through this artificial process?

And that removes the opportunity of evaluating something purely on merit which could completely wreck this hierarchy because then you could have when someone very new come to the top of the game or like then it is evaluated on something that is external to the single journeys of individual people Which is very much not happening

NDA: Which brings us to another let’s say point right Because the problem of how you reinstill like a larger society that has faith in something on stream then you have these institutions that become functional by virtue of the fact there is this sort of external larger order that has been established which is a little bit hard to construct and it’s certainly not the project we’re trying to edify at least not directly. There’s a question of territory in the story a lot because and dimensions of things We don’t know how big this island is But it looks like a small thing at the beginning and because of some of those things they say But then it turns out that it has well perimeter cities and other settlements, smaller settlements I don’t even call them city, but whatever, urban settlements There are hinterlands and people go out and venture out as far as they can from hinterland with the time that they have to explore the islands. And so we know it’s sort of large because of the feats they achieved but not enormous.

It is still an island small and lost enough in a large sea that it is very hard to find. But there is another element of this Solomon’s House, right? Of this academic institution that plays extremely significant in the scientific role in the society as described by Bacon because most of the, a lot of the text is dedicated to it, right? Which is, it pursues all sorts of experiments, collections, infrastructural endeavors digging huge caves and huge pits where they’re keeping things and experimenting and I mean it’s really beautiful and exciting image all this sort of work that they’re doing. And they have training forests and soil collections and soil labs and playing with everything from music to... I mean it’s a real full on thing that goes everything from material sciences to poetry or whatnot there is a way in which they work which is there is first and foremost a service to the state, to the society.

A lot of things they’re doing they have this philosophical or religious aim but that manifests and organize its actions in order to maybe have those that ideological system interact with this in a society that sort of reifies it or keeps it alive and defends the borders of the thing. And it reminds me a lot of my detour into the University of Siena both its foundation as history and its spatial co-development with the city throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It’s very similar where These guys are worried about medical issues and life extension, all of these things that make people live more dignified lives.

And they actively practice it just like for example this university that actually precedes Bacon because it’s a big 12-1300s phenomenon One of the first universities that really is at the service of the state and it’s funded by the state And removes the yoke of the control of the students for example Of the professors because the students pay them like in Bologna and the sort of populist nature of that sort of system of learning And actually makes the state pay the professors and the state collects rent from the housing where the student taxes from the house where the students stay And then fund the professors that way but also have systems to evaluate whether their professors are being well received by students and attracting more students without there being a direct one-to-one relationship The University runs the hospital which is one of the big hospitals of the pilgrimage routes to the Vatican He’s doing all this research related to health by helping curing the pilgrims.

So it has a little bit of that and this service to the territory and incentive system actually keeping the order of pursuits in a way healthy but it also has two other qualities I want to know what you think one is there’s ways in which the institution to keep certain things secret from the political class or from the government itself right? Because you know, whether it’s because they don’t think it’s safe or they don t think it is pertinent, right? And they also have a really nice little hierarchy of, you know They take profitable inventions and get them deployed You know they monitor things and let people know if like a catastrophe coming an environmental catastrophe or something they provide expert advice to the state. This is one thing. The other thing which I think is very interesting in relation to what we’re thinking about at Liminal these sorts of roles but the other one is actually the size of the class like the size for timing, right? Do you remember this?

GP: Yeah. But what about it?

NDA: Well, it’s like they have these five kinds of people: people that go out into the world and collect stuff that other societies are doing without letting them know that they exist; there’s people that organize that information; there are people that set experiments; people that run experiments... To write out the results of experiments or people interpret the results. But each one of these classes in this society has three people and then a series of workers that build tunnels that go 3 miles deep into the mountain But it’s not a... and then they have apprentices that are a big enough group that they can pick the best from and replace at some point one of these three people in each class There isn’t a way for there to be a ladder in there It isn’t professionalized academic class that invites rent-seeking because it’s essentially an elite system. There aren’t enough posts for people to actually bank their livelihood on becoming one of those or 16 people in this society that can do this incredible job.

GP: Yeah, also I think what is interesting if you read other roles there is a clear separation between the practical and the sort of theoretical and epistemic roles in society itself. Then there’s this idea where you can see in the role division the different aspects of what he does and at the same time you have this decentralizing element of these few elites in society. Also I think what is interesting about the role of society in the territory. There’s no distinction or there is a distinction but it is not like right now the research university today is sort of this floating element within a world where it does research and the research goes out and the reason it goes back instead Solomon’s House is an by an applied research organization in the very sense that we are thinking about it. Like the Solomon’s House is the island. Then yeah, because the island is the object, is the place of study and the island Is what has transformed by the studies and the experiments. And so and what produces knowledge through the analysis of its transformations?

So there was no distinction between the Solomon’s House and the island. Because the Solomon’s House wouldn’t make any sense without the island And also I think this relationship with the outside and also the idea that you have these members they keep their nation concealed but they go in other nations to learn from them I think it tells us something about the relationship with old academia of a new robe. But more than anything I think it is important that this separation with politics, which is the fact of not saying certain things maybe, like when we were saying, keeping secrets, which can mean a lot of things in certain findings but it is because politics’s goal is not truth. And it is power!

I think this has a lot of issues in academia today: you get tenure - yes okay job stability but at the cost of pursuit of truth which was the point you were trying to get to because you paid for it with politics and so you get - you have this - In your positions that got you that job, your political individual behavior and your attitudes, political attitudes -but also your role becomes sort of political I think you have kind of... you have a matrix in which you have like truth seeking and politics tenure and no tenure. And you really want to be in the truth-seeking side whether it’s tenure or not tenure. Now it’s very difficult to provide tenure and truth seeking outside of that.

NDA: In many disciplines yeah You can have everyone be elite if your engine is political because it doesn’t have any ties necessarily in reality, you can kind of engineer a system in which there’s infinite ascension of everyone to the highest positions and every credential gets inflated. It’s a forever job, but that’s what’s happening. Instead if you have sort of an objective function, you probably get that small class size and not only small class sizes like an honest division of the roles between the roles that produce knowledge and guidance and the roles that produce experiments and real things.

And this differentiation where not everyone is trying to become a tenured professor it goes to Jonathan B’s reflections in Tocqueville that he published recently on the 250th anniversary in the United States, which is once you create a system where each one of those types of members of Solomon’s house is playing a different game, then you can get people who are good at really different things and build complex functional thing by virtue of that when you have everyone from the master student to the tenure professor all trying to be one thing for a tenured professor who has to teach a little bit because he has a lot of minions in funding or something like that. It just creates this homogeneity that contributes to the whole problem, right? To the whole issue. And I think that’s sort of one thing.

And it has to do with the question as we were saying of authorship and attribution because you need to be able to create these paths where different people can give service to the project, get something in exchange that they need to pursue that service and also build their own dignity through it if we don’t want to call it their own more modern social mobility in CV. Because I think the other thing here is there’s no CV and there’s job market in this story. And everything is very... I think something we said we need to do an episode on is long-term thinking which is another aspect where there’s interesting things that we follow whether it’s along now or what but not, but that are playing with this problem of time. But certainly the space in which we work even though these are very complicated long term projects, I wouldn’t say are a lot of things that may look like what we’re doing but aren’t exactly what we are doing on the same perception combination of long term thinking and size of the result you’re trying to produce right? Some people might be like trying to restore one town.

It’s gonna take 40 years but the combination of thinking that long term and yeah I’m thinking much bigger is rare at this point within the space in which we’re working And I think that brings me two things again The aesthetic description of the priestly behavior of these individuals These applied researchers in reverence that comes from that priestly behaviour and aesthetic customs that are attached to it and material culture. And the other is… So priestly means holding certain things about the present that people are always trying to change, like your shoes – very stable but very noble. That this person wears. And that’s not a thought put into it. And it is what it needs to be in all its senses as the practical anesthetic object.

And then there is also the deep faith in the purpose of the project that makes you not feel small by how much you will be able to contribute to the larger thing but this in this larger thing and the honor of being one of the players building it that makes you deeply humbled and focused on doing everything that you can dedicate your mind and body to and being as serious and rigorous about that as you can to. And you need some of that. I think every founder has a version of that even if they’re trying to go... Maybe it’s not so priestly let’s say but anyone who is building a thing has long term vision. But what I think is more rare is Lorenzetti again right? It’s the idea that there is a picture of something in our case of the territory as it becomes when you are able to pursue your truth the truth that your society abides by there is an aesthetic image a beautiful image a story, right? If we wanna think of it in more religious terms we can imagine as realizable.

That is pulling everyone on this long term project I mean these three people to the three explorers they go on 12 year journeys full of like merchandise and helpers to help them sort of like sell them there and come pick them back up so every time they have to go collect information they isolate themselves from their society for 12 years like a map hoard stuff that another society is doing. And then they come back. So they can do what three journeys in their lifetime or something like that. And they don’t know what happens in those 12 years and have no control over what happens at the home base because they’re not communicated. You need to be able to create some of that energy if you actually want to build something distinct. And something in which requires having the organization having its head down for quite a while before it’s moment comes, quote unquote right?

GP: Yeah I mean I think everything that you said is just on one side the academia now because it is this constant mimetic crisis in literal sense everyone’s trying to acquire the same thing and there is no there is not vogue to stop it it’s like unsolvable mimetic crises no and then you continue continuing continue to try to acquire the same thing. Of course most people will not be satisfied but also there is no higher like the presence of a higher goal and a higher truth which produces this upward aspiration and upward movement moral movement of the system which is what Dranthan Bai was talking about in the Tokyo lecture it’s only possible when this constant memetic crisis is resolved by everyone’s acceptance of this higher goal and everyone’s role in the higher goal but the thing is that the higher goals is higher than the highest figure while in academia today the higher tenured profession. Like there is a guy who is that while if there is higher goal than their role and its benefits.

There’s no competition between the different roles of academia everyone’s working towards something bigger than everyone else I don’t think that exists.

NDA: Yeah so then you’re not too worried about about “Is my labor recognized given I gave 3 months of my teaching assistantship to this research project that produced an article in the New York Times?” That thought doesn’t cross your mind because it’s just also these things become so trivial, right? The project is bigger and you are getting from it something much larger than sort of like the CV so you can go get the job somewhere else or something because you’re sort of you’re on this great journey. You really are unlike this transformative spiritual experience through the work that you’re doing.

And so yeah I mean maybe just to say like once you’re there one other things that I jotted down while I was listening to New Atlantic The scientist was the way in which, of course, this is an expression I think of Bacon himself, but the interlocutor that is this sort of member of Solomon’s House that the explorers get access to, the way which expresses the project is highly centered on a sort of meaningfulness in beauty And he is able to move through all the spaces of the pursuit of truth In a way like Goethe or someone of his kind They can do hard science. They know math. They can think mathematically about interesting things. They also relate it to music to the problem of the polity. This person actually is able to put it all together. When he speaks about, for example, their botanical gardens basically, they have these botanic gardens and they have soil repositories. It’s not the soil repository of the soil scientists today. The way he describes it, the soil is gold in this in this sort of alchemistic way.

The importance of keeping certain substances is precious and politically relevant. It’s all imbued with meaning I guess it’s a thing. That’s why hearing you made me think this quality whether we want to think of it as some of great enlightenment thinkers or the renaissance man or whatever architect or figures we want to point to in history. That doesn’t come from just being a polymath, which would be the most atheistic way of describing it, just describing the quality itself. It doesn’t count from your mind lending itself to being a Polymath it comes from seeing the world as a sort of totality. Seeing your cultural and political and territorial project as transcendent. And then all of it becomes interesting right? Then all of is worthwhile. And also if you end up being the author or not the author, you end or the gal going and transcribing the text because turns out you were more prepared for that by your parents as a child. And so you’re just better at one thing than the other. And if you would have wanted to do something else, all of that is like, who cares? Not a care given.

And you can spend your 20s not thinking about who am I and what is my niche and what do I want for my life? You can just follow in the current. You can throw yourself down the river and let it push you a little bit more this way or the other, but let the flow of water tell you something in a way that none of us are. We’re all extremely resistant to that attitude maybe because of our individualism. Let’s end on something which is let’s not walk through your thoughts on how we think of authorship in very straightforward terms within the construction of the Liminal media ecosystem but maybe just touch on what does it say more broadly about that kind of thinking like what changes about you know in the framework that you’ve been putting together, a little constitutional authorship that you’re putting together.

GP: Well I think there’s two aspects and one is maybe tied to The New Atlantis in a sense when you have a higher goal then you have roles that are clearly defined because not... there’s no memetic hyper competition for the same spot then the authorship and credentialing issue even in a micro scale is not so much an issue anymore if everyone is working to a higher goal and everyone has a clear role in the project that is less of a goal because it’s not like everyone is trying to be the chief theorist on the thing also because the chief theories doesn’t necessarily have the highest like the highest place in any project.

NDA: Absolutely not. Not necessarily and more often than not, it doesn’t really.

GP: Yeah, it does. And so when you remove that, then I think naturally the credit can be attributed to real work that is specific. And then the other aspect which... So I think this if but when this is enacted at an organizational level it removes the problem at a root to an extent. And the other aspect I think that’s separated but maybe has more to do with contemporary academia is there must be sort of extreme ownership individual ownership on the results because especially now with increased cost of vetting of increasing automated workflows. That is the only way in which you ensure that you have the highest quality possible. And that means having each individuals name that has produced and has cared and has vetted the output on top of the piece because otherwise you start having, if that’s not the case especially now when someone delegates everything to an agent doesn’t check the output because they won’t be owning the reputational risk. And I think that is key.

Let’s not give you an example because it might seem like a totally obvious thing but like the case where these things come to mind is for instance we’ve been working on a sort of disciplinary methodology just tinkering with it for 25 years, tons of individual experiments and pouring all this effort into it. We need to write the piece, someone needs to write it. Probably the people that have the most energy into building the contents, what the pieces are about, are not going to be its authors. They’re going to interpret and describe for the institution this thing that right now only lives. In the behavior and this sort of like organic transfer of the approach to other members. So that’s where this problem is coming up. How do we credit the other people? And the answer is: We don’t! This person is just another person writing in service of the institution. They might have nothing to do with them. I’m not even touched on this thing once but they’re the researchers they’re trying to give it abstract clarity. And so they are the people that are really the authors of the thing.

NDA: There’s only one guy going on the twelve year journey, only one person. And they’re coming back with what became. And there’s not two people, there’s nothing people that can fight over those twelve years. One person goes, one person comes. Right? And there is no list of people that the guy has interacted with because that doesn’t impact especially the final product. And it dilutes ownership. You’re like no but a guy on that place told me that I haven’t done it It’s not that guy but you cannot go there you have to go 12 years so you’ll never find out

GP: Yeah, I think maybe that’s where the whole ecosystem then is differentiated but we want all the people that were part of the research team on there and we want them with the right hierarchy because also it’s a reference document for us. We want to know who did that. We wanted to know there was a guy from Mapbox that was doing that challenge and there was this other person that was like a philosopher. And so when we read the report, we might want to fish back those things. But if we move up the level of abstraction of what we’re doing... On our table. On the attachments of our reports with all the engaged people because we generally tend to want to go back and find those persons again. And it’s not always the same teams recontacting or stakeholders that we engage for the community members but once we go up in the ladder of abstraction, the more we go And we see it, it’s incredible, like when we’re working on it, the smaller the team, the more people are scared of putting their name behind the document, you know, because it’s like, it’s you!

People are gonna knock and say oh, what a strange thing that maybe Nikolas worked on But there were other people, maybe it’s not his fault They’re like anyone is gonna read them like you did this and you thought about this way or the other. And you wrote it well or poorly right? So it has a huge impact on excellence. Yes. But Bob...

GP: Yeah sorry. No I think the other thing: It has a big impact on excellent and at least for me personally it encourages originality because then you don’t need to negotiate whether in real life or in your head with everyone else’s opinions. And so it produces sort of a more internally diverse outputs in the institution because of the individuality of the attribution instead of converging to this mimetic mean of what we think we should be saying. You’re not responsible. No one else is responsible for your takes. So in a world where it’s so police and where everyone, of course, has a reality that is not just liminal, you know, and liminal is not that large or stable to be able to offer people an exit from their other realities at this stage. Right?

You’re just we all get put in difficult situations like I don’t want to say that I’ll stand for that, you know on all sides of the spectrum also because this interesting thing about the work we’re doing is like for example our membership is ideologically extremely diverse and so in order to be able to maintain that sort of stay out leave the politics outside quote unquote the policy’s always somewhere so you have to let people each express in a way

NDA: Yeah, it is authentic to them.

GP: And their values because again we don’t have that new Atlantis alignment of religion, policy institution people whatever utopia right? We don’t know that but I guess maybe there’s much to touch on you know on actual real framework but I think what we’re saying is the framework is is important because we need to protocolize it so we don’t think about it anymore there are certain things that increase or decrease excellence passion and diversity of thought inside the institution but it really is a footnote on the constitution and it really something which should not give too much thought once established you know? Like it just what it is like it flies where doesn’t fly And then we see what output it produces. Does it produce excellence or not excellence?

Does it prove more original or less original thinking but it’s not something to be continuously renegotiating which I think is a tendency for example the whole American scenario that I drew at the beginning It’s like authorship is just a topic all the time everywhere on everything because there’s no real consensus right And nothing seems to be good enough but what I’m saying is... It’s just the creation of the culture and the creation also of the diverse tracks is probably several times more impactful in terms of bringing the right passions that it takes to put up this tent, let’s say, that we’re trying to build or this temple - The Solomon’s House, I guess to or not the references to build this new Solomon’s house. That is probably much more important because those people ultimately didn’t even care about writing a paper. They’re just annoyed that they have to write it. And then also like they have share their credit but there were people with real passion like “we’re talking about footnotes”, “we are talking about accounting” “we were talking about replying to some email”.

It’s that dimension of the problem because you have faith in building something that has long-term vision so maybe we need to move on to long term thinking now.

NDA: I think that’s good in next episode I think the only other thing is like: Are you doing the research or are you writing the paper? And then maybe it’s useful or maybe it is not useful but you have sort of an intrinsic motivation to do that. And I think this system right now almost exclusively incentivizes the first So you are writing the papers to get the citation

GP: Right, right, right. It’s all form no content No one cares about the paper That’s why we were so confused when we started the whole peer review thing We couldn’t understand the relationship between the form and the cons So we were trying to do the form And it was just so hard because it felt like it didn’t make any sense and then while you’re in a space that’s a little bit biased It has a little over focus on form And that’s why when you try to reproduce the thing You’re confused because everything you’re referencing is many times something That doesn’t really have a content Isn’t really saying something substantive in the way that you think you should But okay great So until long-term thinking I guess

NDA: Yeah let’s prepare

GP: Great Great.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit liminalfutures.substack.com

This conversation between Nicolas Delgado Alcega and Gabriele Pizzi argues that the territory is the largest scale at which governance is still corrected by reality, and thus the best one at which the craft of governing can currently be experimented with. Their starting point is Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, read as a six-century-old prototype of a territorial dashboard installed in the room where the governing happens. From the fresco they draw a working definition of what Liminal calls territorial statecraft: human flourishing secured through the protocols that generate a place, not the forms imposed upon it. The act of governing, in this account, is less the execution of bird’s eye strategies than the gardening of processes that are continuously in flux, where the beauty of a territory becomes the signal that the garden is being properly tended to.

NDA: Okay, so let’s get into, once and for all, the Lorenzetti discussion on the Allegory of Good and Bad Government — which is really just a conversation about what we mean by territorial statecraft, as the sort of work that we’re doing more generally. And why, for us, that work is motivated by the ambition of trying to secure, or increase, human flourishing in territorial contexts through this act of what we’re calling good government. Coming from not good governance, maybe — which would perhaps be the more technocratic term used today — but good government in the sense of buon governo. What Italians would call buon governo, and what Lorenzetti calls buon governo.

Maybe the best place to start — at the risk of being hated by all the art historians for our description — is to try to describe it. I mean, you’ve been there, right? We’ve talked about it so many times, but…

GP: I haven’t, actually. I studied it many times in my Italian art school cyclical curriculum, where you go through it at least three times before you turn fifteen. But I haven’t been. No, I haven’t.

NDA: I thought you had gone when you did that slow trip from Rome up to the north.

GP: I went to Siena, but I couldn’t get in. I don’t remember why.

NDA: Well, a lot of us have a similar experience with that fresco. We take it for granted as being something that’s pretty well known, but in reality it isn’t necessarily. In my case — and in Ginevra’s case — it’s another one of those hammered references from an American architecture school about what architecture is. You hear it so many times that it starts to become a drag. But then the more you think about it, the more you come back to it, the more it really is an extraordinary work of art. And I think it has shaped the way a lot of us think about the work that we’re doing.

So let’s try to describe it and see if we understand what it is. The Allegory of Good and Bad Government is a sequence of frescoes in a room that I think is called the Room of the Nine — essentially a room in the public palace of Siena, which was a medieval city-state in central Italy. And in this palace of government is where, I think there was a sort of — I don’t know if one would call it an oligarchy — but there was a group of governors that were elected and would meet in this space. And in the 1300s they commissioned Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who is probably the most famous fresco painter of the Sienese school, and they asked him to do this fresco.

The fresco surrounds these four walls of this hall, and it contains essentially two parts, divided into four images. On the one hand you have two representations of the virtues on one side, the vices on the other, and then the polities that result from those virtues and those vices. So on one wall we might see prudence, or courage, and then we’ll see the form of government that the commune of Siena represented. And then on the other one we’ll see the vices, and then the sort of government that results from that. So you have the principles, and then the polity that those principles create.

And then the other two walls are essentially a representation of the territory — a representation of the city and its countryside, in which you see how these principles that produce a polity affect the physical environment. Related to the scene of good government, you’ll see that scene represented in a flourishing city: a city with well-kept buildings, plenty of activity, debate in the public square, commerce, liveliness, well-kept perimeters. And then you also see a countryside that is actively tended to and managed, that is farmed, that has active paths — that essentially has a sort of what we would call a landscaped quality. And then if we look at the representation of the territory for bad government, you’ll see the opposite: a city in ruin, crime, fire, things falling apart, discord. And then you’ll also see a countryside plagued by that — I think there are mercenaries, and buildings on fire, and a countryside that is unkempt and messy. And full of darkness.

So it’s a really fascinating fresco, I think for us in two ways. The first is this artistic exercise in which you represent the two consequences of two tendencies of governing, in the room where the government of that territory happens. Those governors, whoever they are at a specific moment in time, are continuously confronted in their decision-making with these two options. And with the reminder that the way in which you govern has a direct impact not only on human life but on the appearance of the territory — the appearance of the territory somehow tells us what kind of government we have, and based on what kinds of principles. So it’s interesting as a device to, in a way, control the governors, or to encourage certain behaviors.

And the other is this piece I already touched upon: the correlation between physical space, or the built environment, which I think would be the correct term today, and the way in which we control the processes that are at play.

Is that how you see it too? Am I missing anything?

GP: For me, an aspect that you touched upon but that’s central — and it’s often taken for granted amongst us, but in general it’s not so obvious — is that the core idea is not so prescriptive on the form of the territory. It is not saying build your territory like this because it is beautiful. It’s talking about the meta-rules that generate the territory. And maybe that’s also a bit unusual in the way we think about the Renaissance and all that.

It’s maybe the opposite of how we think about certain things, especially in design school. It doesn’t focus on form and the power of form to generate a good life. It focuses on the good government, and on form as a symptom of a good life. Which removes some power from the built environment itself, but I think it’s more honest about how things actually work in most cases — although there is a feedback loop there, and there is probably some circularity: in the same way that having the fresco influences your action, the environment definitely does too. But maybe it’s about the way it starts, or the way it accelerates or changes things.

NDA: Our space, the built environment, is artificial in the sense that it is this manipulated creation of our interaction with other forces on the planet. And so our ability to manipulate and shape it according to certain principles has to have some effect upon the people who then live inside of what we can call a fiction. That’s not necessarily how it’s framed for a typical architect, but that’s the big picture. And that’s not what Lorenzetti is trying to show — which is actually what’s interesting about it. If you shape the built environment in a certain way, then maybe it creates a path dependency for how people think of the world when they live inside these spaces.

In a way, when you’re in architecture school and you see this fresco — not that everyone does — you get excited about this idea that architecture and shaping space can be edifying when met with the right patrons. I think that’s perhaps the best way to stay in the discipline while being excited about this fresco. But it is definitely the opposite.

And I’ve been there a couple of times, and was there recently, as you know, when we did the piece for Studium Senese with my students, and we spent a lot of time in the room talking about it. What is really powerful is that it’s the principles that generate the protocols: if you set up certain rules, then the territory takes a certain shape, and that shape is beautiful or not beautiful based on the degree to which those principles are good and true and properly implemented and fairly distributed — to the degree that they’re good and functional.

You used the term symptom, and I think that’s the most interesting thing. Why do we say territorial statecraft instead of just statecraft when we think of what we’re doing nowadays? It’s because “territorial” gives it that physical reality to the project of statecraft. And what the fresco tells us is that beauty — however we want to think about it — and the idea of a beautiful territory is not what makes it work. You don’t make something beautiful and then have that fix a series of underlying problems. It becomes beautiful when you’ve been able to put together this ensemble of protocols that actually produce that human flourishing.

So when we go and look at the most picturesque Italian rural area that people go to for tourism, what they’re appreciating is not the fact that — yes, the vineyard can be beautiful and ordered, or a rural building is restored. What they’re looking at, what they’re admiring, are the cultures that are alive and operative through a series of systems that they look up to. And so the territory appears beautiful to them.

And that’s what maybe makes our work a little different from the policy people’s. Because implicitly, whether we want it or not — and again, it’s not about whether this is the right or the wrong way — in the end, the way all of us think is that we are pursuing that abstract image of flourishing large-scale spaces or environments that are bigger than a city, that actually include the natural and the artificial and all these sorts of things. We are all after that. And that is our signpost. It’s what keeps the search ordered. Correct?

GP: Yeah, I guess so.

NDA: So let’s unpack territorial statecraft. What do we really mean by that, and how is this image that keeps coming back somehow helping us understand it?

Territory is the object of the project, as already described. And then statecraft is the combination, if we look at it in the most simplistic way, of state and craft. It’s the idea that there is a very careful process — a very careful craft — of how we rule interactions between one another, that we want to be thinking about in order to work on these territorial systems. So statecraft is different from territorial regeneration, or territorial renewal, or conservation of the territory, or some of these other traditions that have a beautifying ambition of the territory and creating functional territories. For us it’s really: what are the rules and systems that produce a flourishing territory? What is human flourishing at a territorial scale? And then what are those instruments, those procedures, those processes through which we are able to produce that?

And when we say we’re pursuing human flourishing and we’re trying to manifest it through good government, it could sound like a political project. But we’re not trying to say good government as in the Senate and the House, or people that have a political mandate within the system. We’re talking about everything that it means to govern something. So a farmer governs the processes on his farm. Someone who is a policymaker is governing the rules through which certain resources get allocated. A politician, for sure, is also governing — because they’re setting out from a principle, in the best of cases. They’re trying to establish a series of principles about what is a good society or a fair society, or what our collective ambitions are, and trying to push the state to actually enact these ambitions at a pragmatic level. So it’s really something that operates at many levels, at any organizational scale, from the family or the independent business all the way to our sociotechnical systems that govern the political process, the allocation of collective resources, and so on.

Is that right? I mean, is it that elastic?

GP: I think that makes a lot of sense. It is a difference which maybe comes through in Italian when you say buon governo. I don’t know how it is in English, but in Italian, governare, to govern, can also be used — no one does it now — to mean the stewardship of a household, keeping things in order in a house. It is that small-scale act of stewardship at the different scales.

But for me it is more than out of the desire to be working on rules rather than objects. It is that the territory is not a thing, in the sense that you cannot really point at the territory. There are things in a territory, but the territory in the end, and also in the way we define it, is a kind of self-contained set of processes. It’s most clear when you talk about a territory and you’re usually defining it either as a set of municipalities, or as a territory in which something is done — the Chianti wine: you have the territory in which that is produced, which has its own character, but the character is given by a process. And that’s how you draw the boundaries, no?

In the same way, when we talk about the Monti Prenestini we’re talking about a mountain, where of course you have this overlap between the processes and the geography — but only because the geography forces a location of the processes. And in the mountains that’s often the case: you have the valley, which overlaps in a sense with this idea of territory as a unit of coherent processes, which is semi-independent in the sense that you can identify inflows and outflows with a certain degree of clarity. Of course then it’s fuzzy, but…

NDA: It’s fuzzy because — it’s not just that. Some people, I think today in the more international context, speak of territory as a way to enlarge the dimension of the city, of the metropolis, and engage the ecological processes of the city. A lot of people talk about it in terms of thinking about a scale that includes environments, or entire habitats, because they’re interested in the relationship between these large natural complex systems.

But in reality, when we think of a territory — and in Italian territorio is used in so many dimensions — it’s trying to describe this stack of cultural, geographic and environmental coherence. And so there’s a historicity to what a territory is. Like you said, the Monti Prenestini is this very peculiar set of communities in interaction with other nearby ones, which was always part of a bigger state, pretty much. But its geography, and the economy that enabled, and the level of connectedness or not that that enabled, created a coherence that makes it so that when you’re there it actually is, in so many ways, very distinct from when you’re ten minutes down the mountain in the valley, or when you’re in the mountains right across from it — like Castelli Romani, which is a completely different reality even though it’s not even thirty minutes away.

So yeah — because it’s a stack.

GP: Yes, but it’s a stack of mutual evolution. And in a way you have that ecological layer, of course, which is what maybe is making territory more popular as it were now. But not only — and it’s also not really different from the technological layer. It is not a different thing: it is the same set of processes, mutually reinforcing and engaged in this inter-evolution between them.

And so you cannot say, well, let’s design this territory, and when we’re done designing the territory, move on to the next one. It doesn’t make sense, because you have many different processes which are mutually reinforcing and evolving. And so you can only garden them. And that’s why I think the good government idea is more similar to gardening than to politics. In the same way that in a garden you have to take a set of decisions, but then there are other processes which influence your decisions. And it is a form of governance — it is more like that form of governance, as opposed to the abstract large-scale politics or policies that are not really influenced in the same way by the reinforcing loops of having direct feedback with a thing.

NDA: And I guess the question is: there are many ways one could pursue human flourishing through good government. Many people try, even though politics is very challenging these days, in the brutal sense of what politics is. But I’m wondering, one, why are we thinking about this? And two, is it actually solving something?

When you were talking, I was thinking that maybe the idea of tying exercises of statecraft and of the control of processes at many scales — or not control, obviously, the management of processes at many scales — has to do with saying: can we verify a material reality that is complex? And see if this exercise in statecraft is changing something.

When I think of where this all starts — where Liminal starts — we’re seeing all of these policies being written for the resiliency and recovery plan of the European Union, and the Italian sub-plan. And it all reads pretty good. I mean, one could agree or disagree with certain things, but all in all it’s a sound plan. But when Ginevra read it — she’s the only person here who went through the thing back to back — we had all these conversations: this is great, but this is not going to land. Already with the little experience we have, having worked in and studied these contexts: all this money is going to trickle down, and then so much of it is just not going to produce any pragmatic transformation of what it’s trying to transform, because the policy is so abstracted from the complex. It’s so narrow and so abstracted that it’s very hard to know whether you’re actually going to produce a change in a reality that is complex and is made up of many parts.

Our interest in complex systems as a framework to look at territories is that every time you touch something, you think you fix one thing and then you realize the rest of the system doesn’t respond, because your premises were wrong about what impact a certain transformation in a place would have had. We think of some — well, not one that we pursued, but: oh, we’re going to restore this building and make a workspace. Sure, maybe that works, but it might just not land at all, because no one wants to go work there, or use that space for co-working. As you know, a lot of fantasies emerged during COVID in Italy about everyone leaving the city and moving to rural towns to co-work for the rest of their lives, remote work. So you think you can actually transform these things, but then reality always hits you with such a greater level of complexity than what the policy can foresee.

Of course it’s not black and white, but is the whole thing of “the territory as a dimension” our way of trying to — because we said, okay, we have to get down, we have to go down on the ground, we have to be there, we have to spend time working on the problems, in the place, getting engaged, getting immersed. Our obsession with the ridiculous amount of stakeholder engagement that we do in each one of these things is just that we really want to get to the bottom of why something works or doesn’t work, or can work or won’t work. And then: our ambition was that we can be part of bringing these policies and making sure that when they land, they do something. That they actually change the system in a way that produces the outputs they expect, or the outcomes that these policies are trying to pursue.

So I wonder: is adding the term “territorial” to statecraft really creating this distinct discipline, as we were theorizing in the previous call — one that says we want to think of governance from a multi-level perspective? Or what makes this different is that this is a form of statecraft that is always measuring itself up against a spatial dimension, where you can actually see if the thing worked or didn’t work.

GP: I think there’s an element that is probably that now we can see that policies at all levels can be measured against their results much more easily than before. And so that creates the necessity, maybe, to go to the level at which you can maximally see those feedback loops, and then try to have that insight trickle up to where the feedback loops are taller and you need more time and more energy to have them directly.

And so I think the territory is maybe the level at which — and there’s a subsidiarity issue here — but it is the level at which the feedback loops are most evident at the current moment. Because we don’t really have that control, although we start having it certainly at a planetary scale, but also at a national level. Well, maybe more than before we can understand certain processes. But then at the regional level it’s still better, and when you get to the territory you almost have a full understanding. Of course it’s never full, but that can produce a governance practice that takes that into account, that takes the dynamism of the processes into account.

And probably that was already happening a long time ago, while it was definitely not happening at larger scales. And now that we see the possibility of doing that at larger scales, it becomes more interesting to go and look at where that’s already happening, to see how it can expand or how it can inform higher-level policies. Essentially, it wasn’t possible before.

NDA: Maybe blatantly it’s so much more apparent now — the difference between resources invested into certain activities of transformation of a context and the inefficiency with which those resources are able to achieve those objectives. It’s much more transparent.

There’s something almost romantic about it. You imagine you start with a painting, and with the painting you tell a story, and that story somehow weighs over the apex of what we can call the governance of a place — of a small place, because it’s a small independent state. And the decisions those people make directly affect the physical appearance of that state at all of its levels. And you see it as more beautiful or more ugly, really at the bottom line, based on the quality of the decisions made and the ways in which those decisions get implemented through a political structure — in this case, a municipal government.

And that space just tells you the story, from ideology — I don’t know if it’s ideology — but yes, the narratives of a society, all the way down to the little transformations of its everyday life. The feedback loops are so clean. It’s just so elegant. And there’s something about the dimension of a Renaissance city-state that is then very seductive in that sense. Because we are, of course, in this system of subsidiarity where there are very large structures. But even not so large, like a national government — it just feels like it isn’t really doing the work. And I wouldn’t say just at a political level. Again, the statecraft, the craft of actually producing certain changes of processes: the feedback loops, as you’re saying, are so visibly broken.

And so then it’s the humbling exercise that we have to go to the ground. I think territorial statecraft is the same humble exercise. This discipline starts by saying: if we can take these smaller dimensions, the territory, and we can wrangle its relationship with its outside processes and its inside processes in a productive way, then somehow everything else can be solved.

And it’s the same idea as the Benedict Option. When things somehow start to fall apart, or feel like the Gordian knots have been created and you see them — and again, we’ve had so much of this experience talking with people that are highly influential through different means, that command influence — they feel so helpless in being able to tackle these Gordian knots, and they don’t think they can change them. So what hope is there for anyone else?

I think the Benedict Option, Dreher’s idea, is strong in that: okay, the solution is not to try to fix the big machine or recover the dysfunctional institutions. The solution is you nurture your family. You create the values and systems that you want to see in the world at the scale of your individual family. You find other families that are doing something similar. You try to live in a community that has that image and those higher values. And then somehow you not only preserve them in a moment of decline, but you also start to reconstitute something new that will then end up coming back out, and will end up affecting that very large scale.

But somehow there are moments in which you have to put visors on and just say: here is a dimension. We’re calling it a territory. We need to make this territory work. The inflows and outflows need to be managed regardless of what’s happening outside, to make this territory work. And when we have somehow fixed this, quote unquote — we’re talking very mechanistically — but when there is real human flourishing here that is distinguishable from somewhere else, especially in a place where there was much less of it than in any other place. Territorial fragility is this: it’s the places that are most affected by our civilizational issues, civilizational risks. Then everything else will come. In 100 years, in 200 years, in 25 years, after AGI. I mean, I don’t know — but in the meantime we do what we can.

GP: I think there’s an element to which the territory is the largest unit that you can work at in a way that is permissionless and disintermediated by larger structures. And it’s very difficult to do it. Of course, territory is also a fuzzy concept — it can mean one municipality or ten or twenty — but it is the largest unit of space and of society that you can work at.

It’s a bit of a detour, but I was thinking of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government as a sort of Balaji dashboard ante litteram. Of course it’s not a dashboard, because the painting is static, but it is this idea of seeing the consequences and the results of decision-making and governance as projections of them, live, as you’re working. And that is something that today is becoming possible: that you can see the consequences of your work and of governance live — as opposed to Lorenzetti’s image of what would happen. You can see what actually is happening, and you can project—

NDA: You can have a live Lorenzetti.

GP: Yes, you can have a live Lorenzetti, and that changes how you’re working. A static Lorenzetti is already great, and not everyone has a static Lorenzetti — and people could do way better with the static Lorenzetti they already have. But now you can have a live Lorenzetti. You can see the territory change, you can see the territory becoming, you can project what’s going to happen, and that changes things.

And I think at a territorial level it’s real, while as you go up it’s still very abstracted. I believe that at some point — and it’s mostly a technological issue — we’re going to have that at a different scale. But at the territorial level, governance is still real in the sense that it is bound by reality. And territories, especially in Italy — there has been so much evolutionary pressure in determining the shape and size just of municipalities throughout the ages, and city-states and all that, that the boundaries and the borders are very real. There is a reason for that, because people have tried to change them for thousands of years and succeeded in doing so, or not.

Instead, even the nation state — nothing against nation states, very nice — is determined mostly by abstract social and cultural processes. Europe maybe not so much, in the sense that Europe has had a lot of that boundary-setting that has made the borders sensible in a way that they are shaped by the geography. But not always. Which I think makes it an interesting laboratory for this kind of governance. But if you want to go at a larger scale, sometimes you have to reimagine the borders of the larger-scale systems, which, since it was not possible to really govern them based on reality, were governed based on abstract ideas. And so the territory is that balance, I think. And now the region is becoming possible, and I think at some point we’ll also have larger scales — but of course, the larger you get, the more you have to fight with abstractions.

NDA: And again, this discipline that cultivates territorial statecraft doesn’t mean let’s work on local government, or let’s work only on establishing cooperative structures to manage a certain kind of agricultural product. It doesn’t preclude the ambition of affecting things maybe at a European level, at a national level, and working in those games of higher-level abstraction. In fact, I think the way we honestly think about it is multi-level. What is really great is to be able to transform the way we all think at each one of these levels — from the farmer to the mayor to the technical official locally to the regional department to the national ministry to whatever — and create a new concatenation of those scales that is producing positive changes, in whatever way we want to define them, that manifest at the scale of the territory.

And I think one of the most important things you said there — I never thought about it this way — is that even politics at the territorial scale still works relatively disintermediated by things like social media, and by abstract narratives of what our problems are and what our needs are as a society, which are unverifiable. Whereas politics has moved a lot at larger scales towards that. At the local level, it’s a little signal that there’s something a little bit healthy: if something happens, the mayor is going to get bashed. Whether it’s your fault or not, you’re going to have to fight it out at a municipal meeting, because something happened and you go and say your two cents. And it’s not romantic or anything, but there is a higher level of functionality at that level. Maybe at the technical level less, because there are weaker technical structures the smaller you go into the dimensions of government.

But the idea is that we want to hold on as much as we can to what you’re calling the less abstract relationship between shaping processes and seeing results, no matter what scale we’re at. So if we’re working on collaborating on a European policy initiative, what we’re asking — that maybe no one else is asking, or not so many people are asking in the same way — is: how does this interact with all these other forces when we imagine the policy applied at the local level? We can be at a super high level of abstraction, but the benchmark is always: let’s now walk through this in five cases and see how all these other local forces and pragmatic realities interact with our policy. And let’s really try to put pressure on it through this approach.

GP: And I guess that’s also why it is more real on a local level, more honest. Also, I think it goes beyond political boundaries — people vote for a mayor that’s not on their usual political side much more often than they vote across party lines at a national level. But it’s also because you can just see the thing.

NDA: There’s a lot of lies that can be put between you and reality at a national government level, but also at the regional governance level. They can tell you whatever, just to keep you happy.

GP: It becomes unverifiable.

NDA: It becomes unverifiable.

GP: And then there isn’t the same solidarity aspect, with also the crisis of loneliness, the psychopathification of our society through short-form video or whatever. We’re becoming less good at hashing it out and trying to find a solution, because in the end we both live on the same street.

NDA: And the local government governs these ten, twenty streets. Even at a city level, it’s just so hard to manage very basic things about interactions inside of a neighborhood, because the systems have become so large and abstract. So yeah, there’s definitely something to that.

I keep thinking about this other discipline — the one we’ve been talking about, that includes our friend Alberti. But, well, no, sorry — actually what I wanted to touch upon, because we’re hitting on politics a lot again: the idea of cultivating territorial statecraft is also about not worrying about the politics too much, precisely because of what we’re saying. We’re in a moment where the politics is very complicated and politicians are in a very tight spot. It’s very difficult to do something politically. That’s a long story, but it just is.

And so that’s why I think it’s statecraft. Let’s just look at spaces — whether it’s improving processes on a single farm, or being inside a regional department that is trying to implement one type of policy or this or that or the other — and let’s actually just try to experiment with new ways of running those machines and those processes, of creating new protocols to address the current needs of these structures.

And this comes back to the challenge of teaching versus researching, which is really what we are doing at Liminal. But again, thinking not just about our role, but about the idea of territorial statecraft more broadly: what you want to do is be creating the protocols through the research, and then the community of people that share this vision of protocolization, that understand some of these protocols as developed and can develop their own. You want to have all those people experimenting at whatever level and in whatever territorial context they wish — not because we have some ambition that that’s going to fix the Gordian knot of a national government or whatever, but actually because you’re just exercising. You’re working out. You’re training at a job — let’s just call it that: you’re at a job, you’re a manager at a private company or an employee at a state department. And we’re just sort of putting together this kind of movement while we’re waiting for the next thing.

Because I think what’s always true is that the Gordian knot at some point — what do you call it — the balloon always bursts. The thing doesn’t hold, and there’s a reconfiguration. And that can happen very soon; it’s unpredictable. It can happen overnight tomorrow, or it can happen fifty years down the line. But the idea is that once you get to the pressure points like the ones we’re experiencing today, it feels like it’s close.

And so you’re not actually trying to create a community of people that are working to fix the system. They’re experimenting with the system as it is. But what they’re building is muscle for the next system. They’re building experience. They’re building reputation. They’re demonstrating the value of working with these approaches and using the protocols that we’re developing. And eventually, at some point, there is a cascade effect in which everything gets reshuffled. And if you are already in the space and you are, quote unquote, “the best,” there’s a good chance you can play a role. You can reposition yourself to actually build the new structures. Or you can at least ensure that you are part of the intelligentsia that is actually going to run the new machine. So that we can continue each one of our cultural and political projects past the expiration date of some of the institutions that won’t get fixed.

GP: I guess it’s also way cheaper at some point to just substitute processes rather than fix them when they get too broken. And also the good way of doing that is probably not through a revolution, but just through the establishment of functional systems piece by piece. And you can do it most effectively at the smallest scales — maybe even smaller than the territory.

NDA: Like an individual.

GP: Yes, but also that’s where you can actually establish functional things, functional systems, because there’s no permission. You don’t need any permission except that of the people involved to do something at a local scale. And if the person involved is you, then you can just do it.

NDA: At every scale. If you start with the family or with your individual household, then you can decide everything — and you pay for all the consequences. The higher you go up, the more intermediation and permissioning there is. And there are plenty of opportunities, the more local you are experimenting, to actually acquire permission with less of a need to prove some sort of track record, or to have given service to some professional structure that permissions you to then try — at the point when you’re already too tired and you’re 45 and you think, you know what, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing.

GP: And so that then just creates, I think, the right starting point for all of these transformations. Because as you start having these functional processes at a small scale, a federation of them becomes possible. But if you start from the federation, then you get trapped by the existing incentive systems, and by the existing political dynamics, or by the existing dysfunctions — because you’re trying to enter the system at a level that is too high up. And so it’s resting on rotten foundations, and it’s much more difficult to trickle down when it’s too entrenched and the path is too set, and there are too many incentives contrary to transformation of any kind. And I’m talking about very simple and physical processes too.

NDA: It’s a waiting game. It’s a waiting game where you really don’t engage, because so many forces today encourage us to get conflictual — of course, at no cost to ourselves. Be verbally conflictual online. Just go out and vote for people that have conflict-prone views across the spectrum. We’re always invited to take a side, to decide to talk to this person but not to the other person. There’s this radicalization that we are experiencing.

And in a way, the answer is not to have the right radical view, or to found the third radical thing, or to try to replace this or that. It’s a Benedict option. It’s a waiting — it’s a holding pattern. You just have to wait it out. You need to find a space where you are not extracted from reality, but you’re learning from reality—

GP: Oh, you lost me?

NDA: No, no, I can hear you now. Yeah — where you’re still learning from reality, but you don’t have the ambition to actually take over or transform or flip it around. You just build up competency.

The present is a hinge [unclear]. And then, if you believe in whichever of the cycle theories — from the Spenglerian civilizational one to the Fourth Turning or Ray Dalio’s framework — it’s easy to just be confident that right now this is the next thing we’re thinking about. What do we do in the next ten years? Because we want to consolidate an institutional project over the arc of the next ten to twenty years. So what are we doing in the next ten years? The climate is: until something changes, until we receive other news, don’t enter the conflict. Just put your head down, do great work.

And maybe something that we’re not saying here is: don’t fight the incentive system. Just try to do incentive system plus. We said this at another moment: the game is, okay, we have to implement a policy for this sort of thing with this sort of politics. Okay, great, why don’t we do that — but then we also add a little bit of experimentation to it, and we try to get one more thing out of it. We try to go one step beyond. We comply. We do what needs to be done in the present, but always with an eye for: can this let us try something out? Could we do it just slightly better, or with a slightly different, additional goal?

And I think that’s the reality of what we’ve been doing, and what we call, in a way, applied research. It’s being highly respectful of the reality that we come across, and then inviting and saying: what’s the plus here? What’s the thing we’re going to add? Not the thing we’re going to remove, not the thing we’re going to challenge. What’s the thing we’re going to add that allows us to create this third space, that allows a certain experimentation?

GP: I think that’s what’s most refreshing, at least to me, about this approach: that a lot of everything now is antagonistic. It is contra X. And instead it becomes this duel in which everyone is waiting for the other person to move, to reject it or oppose it. It looks like everyone’s doing something, but actually nothing is really happening, because you’re just waiting for the other. At some point you start being contra intentions — you’re debating each other’s intentions in order to oppose them, and no one’s doing anything, because everyone’s waiting for the other person to move. And I think a lot of politics right now is that.

NDA: Like a lot of friend groups, you know?

GP: Yes, a lot of everything is like that right now. And also a lot of design.

NDA: Yeah.

GP: And there’s no way to break that cycle other than just doing something that’s not oppositional and that is at least constructive, from which to start multiplying initiatives and products and outputs of any kind — and debates too, but with a different direction. There’s so little creativity in anything, because you start by asking: how do I protect myself against this? Or how do I stand in relation to this other thing? And everything becomes defensive, and defensive means fear-induced to some degree, protection-induced. And so it’s just not conducive to making new things.

NDA: Yeah — to creating new realities and transforming the way things work with a sort of positive vision. And I think that’s why so many talented people with a certain level of vision have fled, for example, to US tech or things like this, because ultimately those spaces remain generative. And they deal with difficult questions, and they have upsides and downsides. And we can again get quickly conflictual about who we like and who we don’t like. But none of that really is the point — the valuable thing happening there is that there’s an almost naively positive energy trying to do something, and there’s, for a series of reasons, a space to do that and to play a large game.

But I think the Benedict Option is the other way you do that — where you can always build a space, like what tech was at some point, within a different area of human action. That is not technology. But you can build those spaces precisely by trying to take some distance, not picking fights, and just trying to do work that either works or doesn’t work. Letting reality teach you as well, and surrounding yourself with people that have that same predisposition to the work and are motivated by that same approach.

I wonder if there’s anything to be said about the other discipline, in closing. Because what I come back to is that there’s something odd, something original, about the way that we’re thinking about this — about what we’re trying to build here altogether. It can’t be easily compared to any other thing. But I do think the construction of the lineage gives us more points of entry, gives us more references that relate to historical periods that were working with very different constraints.

Because in all of this, while you were talking, I was thinking: you go on our website and you’re like, okay, cultivating territorial statecraft. And then you find all of these design products and tech outputs, technology outputs. And it’s just wild. I think of a public policy school: they go there and they’re like, oh, okay, yeah, this relates to us, when you see the title. And then you go in and it’s just all of the tools, all the instruments, all the outputs that we’re trying to produce, and it’s so upside down. Almost disorienting for the status quo.

And it’s not so important how other people see it, but I realize it’s very strange, the combination of parts that we’re putting together in building this chassis that we’re making. And more work on that would yield greater clarity. I think we want to do more than Alberti, who was ultimately a trusted advisor of a prince, and really was a great theoretician who manifested his theories in a few cultural projects and buildings and whatnot. Do you know what I mean?

GP: I was trying to explain this whole attempt at defining what we’re doing to a friend the other day, and I understood that the core mismatch — the thing that made it most confusing, and I think right now we manage to be a bit confusing to everyone, not only the policy school that comes on the website — is that we’re essentially operating from a very different understanding of the world than, in that case, traditional architecture.

The most evident difference — and maybe it’s a personal perspective of mine, but I think it resonates in the wider conception of work that we have — is that there is a standard view that has a very clear idea of one set of problems, spatial in architecture for example, and everything else is kind of enchanted. There’s this magical aura about it, that has to get included in the project, but it’s a magical, poetical approach to that. While instead there is — and this is maybe what resonates with Alberti — another perspective in which the design project is part of a system that can be understood, that can be investigated, that’s not itself enchanted. Which doesn’t mean that it’s a purely technical, measurable thing that has to be approached in a technocratic way.

But what makes it most resonant for me with all that line of thinking is understanding the entirety of the world, in all its subclasses and the definitions that we have created to get around them, as essentially a system that can be understood in a rational way and that can in turn be designed in a rational way. And that’s something that we kind of lost hope in, I think, culturally. It’s the value of the artificial — not as the crappy plastic thing that has to be eliminated in favor of the natural, but of the natural as something that, although you didn’t create it, although humanity didn’t produce it, is still something that can be analyzed. And that’s the core of science, no? Something that can be understood, not something that is magical. And so technology, or human-made things, can aim at that. And so it is a process of co-evolution of the two. And that’s why statecraft is not in contradiction with design or technology output.

NDA: I think there’s a great piece on Palladium that touches upon some of this — it was recently made open access — about how we went from climate apocalypse to apocalypse, and how we have all of this fear-based attitude towards the relationship between natural and artificial that has become really crippling.

And it all comes back to all these disciplines that have lost a telos — they’ve lost this larger purpose. And so all that’s left are the tools. And of course, the tools without a purpose start to create all these scary and horrible things for all of us. We lose faith in our ability, or in their ability, to produce something that we can call good — to contribute to the good life, whether good human life or good life on the planet, whatever you decide. But the good life, which is just something that’s out of the conversation, and is so central to things like Lorenzetti. The purpose is to instantiate the good life within a boundary, in his case within the city-state. And then everything else is downstream. And that’s so foreign to people.

I was with a friend and we were talking about academic publications, and I was like, well, we’ve got to start writing somewhere else, because these things have become a little less interesting. And he’s like, well, yeah, but they were never interesting. They were always just to get ahead. And I was like, well, no, they weren’t really. We’ve just forgotten that they could be.

But I just want to end on a point, which is something I realized — I was thinking about it before we got on to record: it can look like we’re here constructing this abstract apparatus out of first principles, that we’re totally inventing it and whatnot. But what’s been really productive about a lot of the thinking that’s going on inside Liminal these days, and in these past months, is that all of this — it might seem too abstract for the person that, as you’re saying, you try to explain it to, and it just seems all over the place — but it actually is just the result of the decantation of all of the practical experience of the last five years.

Do you know what I mean? It is a decantation of what we have found works. All of our misuse, I would say, of the lean startup, and all of these ways of thinking about making product — tech products in tech startups and all this — that we’ve somehow brought into how we think of building an institution. We really have played with that formula, and it really has brought us here. And all of these things: the idea that what we’re doing is cultivating territorial statecraft, that the objective is really, in the end, good government, that the value we bring to environments in which we do applied research, or to the trainings that we’re doing, is X and Y. All of that is really this process of us having certain ideas and terminologies — which are so foreign to what we were discussing today at the beginning — about what a theory of change is, what value we can provide, what we want to achieve, and just hitting against reality, and testing and testing and testing, until we sort of find a space.

And the fact that we have found a space — I wouldn’t call it extremely solid, or say that we are God knows what kind of organization — but the fact that we have actually found the product-market fit, or the institutional problem–method fit, or I don’t know what the right framework is, is allowing us to re-semanticize the whole thing so that we can finish getting rid of all the accumulated fluff that we’ve been carrying through different iterations of Liminal, iterations of the work we did, of how we saw ourselves. And so we can really move towards realizing this vision at scale, and not just demonstrably, as I think is the case of where we are today.

I don’t know if you have anything to say, but I think maybe that’s a good place.

GP: It’s a good place to close it. I agree. I totally agree with the entire framing, and it’s definitely coming together — which maybe right now it doesn’t look like, but I think in a few weeks, months, and definitely years, we’ll look back and see a whole system forming. Which is maybe more through subtraction right now than addition, even if it doesn’t look like that.

NDA: And so there’s always another pivot, to use yet another recent term. But let’s hope that we can start to get also into a lot of the operative work. You’ve been talking about case studies — that we actually have time to get into case studies and all these things, and that the space we’re giving to theorizing actually becomes a space we give to constructing, in a way, evidence for the edification of this project outside of, of course, our own humble efforts, which can only ever get so far. We plan to get very far, but that we can start to really bring in all those things around us that somehow are our cousins, now, in the past or in the present — rather than get lost in becoming too enamored with the way we have been able to conceptualize what is ultimately our reality today.

GP: One hundred percent.

NDA: Great. There’s nothing next now.

GP: There are other nexts, but there’s no pending to-do. So maybe the next one will be a little bit more freestyle.

NDA: Yeah, well, we’ll see. Great. Talk soon.

GP: Thank you. Talk soon. Bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit liminalfutures.substack.com

This conversation between Nicolas Delgado Alcega and Gabriele Pizzi explores how Liminal’s applied research and challenge-based workshops are evolving into a structured training paradigm for territorial statecraft. By bridging transdisciplinary skill sets and building a shared culture across levels of governance, Liminal aims to establish an original discipline and a lasting peer network.

NDA: We thought it’d be good to have this conversation to flush out a little bit of something we’ve been doing for a long while but that is now acquiring a greater structure: everything that we can call, let me say, the education or training component of Liminal. Which maybe the moment to talk about this now is that in reality, since Liminal began with the partnership with MIT, Italy between Gina, me, and Simonetta, we were doing this combined, let’s say, activity of applied research and experimentation and fundamentally also training, right?

So there were undergrad and master’s levels MIT students coming over, as well as some faculty the first year, of course, and they were coming over and we were trying to figure out some problems together. But certainly there was, of course, a lot of learning going on—it was just more of a collaborative, collective learning process.

And then a lot of the activities that we’ve done as an organization, they’ve always had this sort of hybrid where really there is serious skill acquisition on the part of what are today members, right, that partake in the challenges. But the challenges are really more and more actually applied research initiatives where we are less focused on maybe transferring an approach, a skill set, a way of thinking about problems to anyone, and more focused actually on bringing people with diverse competencies and having them collectively find a way to tackle a specific issue, right?

And we still have to do the call on challenges. But essentially, the challenge has really moved away. If anything, maybe what the challenge is for a lot of members who come to a challenge for the first time is a first real exposure not to what most of us think we’re attracted to, which is multidisciplinarity, but it’s actually a first real experience with transdisciplinarity. So with a lot of people that are coming with a training from one discipline, but are not really being asked to fulfill this narrow, well-established role of “you are the economist in the room, do this part, this economics part” or “do this design part because you’re a designer.” Of the challenge, it’s actually a lot more indeterminate than that. And so it’s somehow pulling on specific skills and specific knowledge that people have to do something without actually thinking of them as, I would say, quote-unquote “professionals” or sector-specific people.

On the one hand, this has happened with challenges, right? On the other, we’ve started to engage in more specific activities that are specifically about training. And the best example, of course, was the Forum LEADER Giovani last year in Sicily, in which we took almost 40 young people from across Italy, from about 17 regions in Italy, and ran this workshop as part of the collective—the forum essentially that gathers all the Local Action Groups in the Italian context of the European LEADER program. We worked in the venue, collaborated with the EU CAP Network’s local office here in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and with a Local Action Group in Sicily, and we delivered this project that was really, really just a training, right?

We took a specific set of protocols that we have developed across several challenges; in a way, we bundled things we already knew how to do. And we said, “Okay, here is something that we’re going to get done in a week. It will have an impact on the territory.” But actually, that impact we’re pursuing is more focused on transferring a certain approach to the participants than it is to wanting to solve the problem on the territory, right? So someone comes to us and says, “We want to do a training,” and we say, “Okay, we can do a training, and we can transfer really a way of thinking about this kind of work around—about the work of territorial statecraft, right?”

And the way we do that is we actually get something done. And by getting something done and applying a lot of the principles of what we do in a challenge, but in a more didactic and controlled environment, we are able to walk people through and basically—I don’t know what’s the right term—teach them elite working skills, or expose them to elite working behaviors, and to a certain ambition with which, an originality and open-mindedness, especially in the space in which we work, with which one can approach this problem of territorial statecraft into different professional opportunities in which it presents itself, right?

And it was really the workshop in Sicily last year—you were there, you were quite a protagonist in both its organization and delivery. I think that a good place to start is: what was different between a training module that we did, that in a way tried to walk people through a challenge where they get something done, and the challenge itself, right? Are there other distinctions than the ones that I described that you see?

Because from there we can go—you know, the whole motivation of this—there are very exciting and, I would say, relatively large projects on the horizon relative to our current scale that are squarely focused on training and knowledge transfer. So what have I missed there in the distinction between what are becoming these two areas of work? And then we can get into what is the theory of change of pursuing both your applied research and training arm within Liminal.

GP: Well, I mean, when you were speaking, I was thinking about something I was reading last week as part of the research for the protocolization essay. And there’s this whole theory in this field that I don’t know, maybe you tend to define as technology studies or something, or studies in what is artificial. But there’s this guy, Gilbert Simondon, who talks in his dissertation about this idea of concretization. And he talks about technology and how the development of a technical object—like an engine, for example—starts from this abstract idea of the engine where you have different parts, but the parts are like very distinct, and they relate in a certain way that produces the behavior of an engine. And throughout its development—I don’t know if you have the image of the Raptor engines from SpaceX—they become simpler and simpler each generation.

NDA: Yeah.

GP: Sort of like the parts become merged in the systems and optimized for the function of the whole in a way that at some point you cannot really distinguish them in such a clear way as in the beginning—sort of as if they’re not anymore their own element, but the whole thing is now an element. And I think it’s a good metaphor for what we went through from the first challenges, in the sense that at the beginning we were doing transdisciplinarity, but in a very traditional sense in which you have the emergence of a new discipline: you have problems that no single discipline really is able to solve, so you bring together different people, but everyone has their own role, and you can clearly determine the points in which they intersect. So you have someone doing one part and then handing it off to a specialist in the other domain.

And I think what we went through—which forces us to have this division in the recent focus on training—is that in the discovery and in the concretization of this field of work, at the beginning we had distinct individuals where someone knew how to code, someone knew how to design, how to do communication really well, and we could work together. But now we have a cohesive way of thinking about a problem that is, in a way, agnostic of the technical skills, and at the same time it merges these different disciplines together into a single thing which we’ve been long past describing through its components.

NDA: Yeah, a long time.

GP: It’s been a long time since we were doing a project in which there was both a software development aspect, an architecture aspect, and a communication aspect—everything was very much integrated already. And I think at this point, once you have that integration, training becomes more of a bridging element. It takes a lot of time to get into that mindset because you don’t really have anyone trained in approaching the problem that way, and so it becomes really inefficient to advance the field.

NDA: Yeah.

GP: And that’s what I think is the difference. It’s like, now when you have people that know how to think of the problem that way, you can get them immediately in the space where they can advance the field. Instead, if you have people that haven’t been exposed, it’s not about teaching them tools necessarily; it’s more about showing them this different, cohesive approach.

NDA: Yeah, it’s been a long time, and I had almost forgotten since Gina and I were hollering down lists of disciplines and making sure we had the right skill set in the room to pursue the challenge that we thought had to be pursued, building up these teams that we thought could achieve something that we weren’t sure we could achieve, but we sort of committed to with our partners with full intensity within a short timeline with a bunch of strangers at the beginning, right? Because the teams were teams of strangers.

I think several things have changed that what you said made me think of. The first is: the challenge really does have a methodological clarity, and it is pursuing a specific series of what we’re calling protocols—basically this original space of outputs that is not described better by any other disciplinary language.

Why do we have to come up with protocols? Why do we have to come up with challenges? We started thinking about the challenge methodology, and the paper we’re working on with Maren, Mistaya, and Daniela is saying: there are all these ways of working, especially with participatory practices, design, and planning, particularly in these spaces that are designed for different contexts. And what we’ve been able to achieve through all this applied research is figure out what about those things works, and what about those things actually doesn’t work in the context in which we practice, that have very peculiar conditions in terms of their actor networks, in terms of their resilience, in terms of their degree of formality, whatever it may be, right?

And so we’ve constituted, through the challenge, almost a way of practicing something. That something is producing a series of things that we are calling protocols that are not tackled in that way by any other discipline—one would have to find people from six different disciplines to make the protocols that we’re making if one were to stick to the disciplinary parameters.

And then, as you’re saying, we don’t even—it’s almost like both in what’s becoming trainings and challenges, we mostly just look for extreme drive and for the right kind of attitude in people, and we know that that’s enough. And I think that’s enough because we’re not really doing anything transdisciplinary anymore, because it has this emerging form of an emerging discipline, right? And we’re not alone; there are other people that are doing this and trying to call it different things. But it’s actually as though what we’re calling territorial statecraft in the pursuit of what we’re calling “good government” (or Lorenzetti—whether this is the Lorenzetti episode we have to have, we don’t think we can unpack completely territorial statecraft and Lorenzetti here today), but that pursuit is already creating its own architecture and its own space where we often find ourselves competing with organizations that might look like they work on the same thing, but they actually do something completely different. We were talking about that the other day.

Or they might—you know what I mean? It’s just like there’s a certain originality with which we come at the problem where sometimes there’s an opportunity in a partnership or something, and once the collaboration begins and we start to structure a project, it’s almost as if the partner becomes aware that they’re not walking into what they thought they were walking into. They’re not walking into people that do training for local development or people that are designers that are going to do speculative design for some exhibition we want to do or this or that or the other. It’s just this third thing. And I think that’s quite interesting, but then maybe to bring it—or that’s quite exciting, I think.

But maybe to not get stuck on that, which is its own episode—what is, in a way, the discipline of territorial statecraft in the pursuit of good government, which is not policy—I would say the question of challenges and education within the architecture of what we’re all building here is essential in the theory of change of how Liminal specifically achieves the construction of this discipline or contributes to the construction of this discipline. It’s an organization whose value is in being able to establish this space that right now is sort of undefined and dispersed.

And maybe let me throw out the most basic way in which we are thinking of the theory of change today, and let’s try to push back on it a little bit. What we’re doing is we’re an organization, and we’re delivering on the one hand challenges: so we take on a new problem, and we develop a protocol and protocolize, experiment with a protocol in place in an applied way. And that produces for us understanding on how does this discipline work methodologically, so out of the challenges evolve a practice, a way of practicing, let’s say. And then it also produces this experimental output, so tells us what are the results that this practice yields and what spaces can be owned or contributed to by this discipline or not.

And then we have—but that is really research. We aren’t really just trying to develop one method like whatever, stopping or what not, to go always back to very early ideas and then just do that at scale as big as we can, and then just become like the only objective being the firm-like delivery of a service. Also because we know that that doesn’t really work in these contexts of low demand and captured networks. So we’re figuring out how to practice the discipline, actually, but organizationally we don’t, at least at this moment, have the ambition of just verticalizing on any one challenge solution, right? In fact, we’re actually looking for ways in which these things verticalize on their own through protocolization—that’s why we’re talking about protocols.

So education or training or whatever we’re going to call it is actually the space in which we are able to operationalize and bring the practice, the discipline, to life. And that’s what’s really exciting about the opportunities on the horizon—of which, of course, we can’t say much right now because everything is in flux—but it’s an opportunity where we’re not training architects or economists; we’re actually training people at all levels of governance of a territory, whether people that have the ambition to go work at a municipality, people that have the ambition to be part of a Local Action Group, to work in a regional planning office, to be at some directorate at the European Union, right, all the different levels actually that govern how development and territorial governance happen in a place.

And we’re bringing those people and we’re exposing them to an original way of thinking about the problem, to a different way of practicing what they will end up doing within one of these jobs—whether it be the technical official in the planning department in a small town or someone writing really abstract policy documents at the EU—and we’re exposing them to a different way of thinking about what you do with those outputs, because all those are protocols, actually.

And we are also, I think, really on our topic of the problem with ambition in the European Union, right, and how there’s some sort of culture against ambition in many spaces—just reawakening that, just creating these moments where young people that are so under the weight, especially in this work which has so much bureaucracy and red tape on top of it, in which they feel like it’s impossible to make a dent, like they need so many credentials, they need to go through so many steps in order to just get permission to do labor, you know? And just give them this different approach which is: you can make of the job something more than what it is, you can think of it originally, you can work much harder than you think you can work and achieve much more in much less time than you think you can achieve it. And there are methods, there are processes, and there are also ambitions of the work—things one wants this discipline to achieve—that you can aspire to, that also can fuel the drive to do that.

And that’s the training: if we can insert people with the right attitude, with methods, with a network that actually helps them understand this multi-level space, and we can instill this new kind of elite behavior in multi-level territorial governance, then all of this protocolization, actually, is just the beginning. It’s just food for thought; it’s just 20, 50, 100 things that we might figure out how to protocolize over the next 20 years, but that are the driver for protocolization to happen at every level through all of these people that somehow are on board on this mission, right?

GP: Yeah, and I think that an aspect of how we are doing this which to me feels really relevant and is core to the method of training is that of working on a real project and just really doing the same thing that we do in challenges and in research, but guided and slower and with more flexibility on the results. We’re doing training, but we have some objective measure of the results—which doesn’t mean quantitative only, but it needs to have this real, visible impact.

And it has it by design, which is really rare in these fields which have been rendered completely relativistic. Especially the local development space has become more and more a space of unquantifiable claims and goals and activities, which are—more than unquantifiable, which is not necessarily a problem—non-objective or non-measurable in any way, even non-numeric.

I think that is really refreshing, and it’s really refreshing for the people who want to have an impact and have some kind of ambition which maybe they don’t see that they can pursue in the public and mainstream version of their discipline or their career trajectory, but they are looking for it.

And I think that is a core aspect of how you build that culture in these different levels of governance: it is through a complete change of perspective in what that is. Which I think is where a lot of the confusion comes when people see that we’re doing research and training in local development—they expect what everyone expects when they hear these labels: learning a little bit about policy and then learning a little bit about how you do engagement and participatory processes, which are pretty standard in a lot of local development funding programs at this point in the European Union.

So, yeah, I agree. And I wonder if maybe—

NDA: The other thing that’s interesting about: you always ask, “are we doing training or not?” because in reality, all our training is peer-to-peer. Everyone is always under about 35 years old, right, at least until now. And sure, that changes as the organization matures and everything, but there’s something telling about that, which is the difference between the participant and the training team is actually people that can see, have seen, or haven’t seen what you’re describing.

So the real difference is: have your eyes been opened to opportunities that maybe didn’t feel like they were there, to ways of entering the work without having to wait for so much permission, to ways of making of existing programs, financial incentives, etc., and 10x-ing the impact that you can get from that?

And more than anything, as you’re saying, more than anything the difference between trainers and trainees is simply the idea that actually in a week you can basically solve a problem and sort of close it there. That’s not true of everything, of course—it’s a generalization—but just that emotional experience of: even if you made a tiny dent in one of the aspects of one of the layers of what we call a territory in one context, you can actually do that, figure out how to do that, do that, measure whether you did or didn’t do it, and take home something to verify whether that thing you measured in time is actually going to create multiplying effects.

And just seeing that completely changes many things. But that really is a difference, and that’s why I wonder if we’re talking about something that’s somewhere in between: it’s actually training because you’re trying to not transmit a whole discipline, but you’re trying to transmit a way of approaching the problem; or maybe we’re just compressing what we’re calling a discipline in development into these very brief, 4- to 15-day programs. But maybe what we’re doing is somewhere in between training and mentoring, right?

Because you think of mentoring—like elite mentoring in the 18th century or something—it’s like you take your kids, and they spend a bunch of time with someone that’s extremely smart or talented or successful at something. And sure, that person’s going to spend a little bit of time explaining things to your child, but in reality, what your child is going there to do is to shadow this person and sort of absorb a whole series of precepts that are intangibles.

And it’s that effect where you go to architecture school, and before you know it, you’re dressing a certain way, you’re talking a certain way, you’re reading certain things, you’re looking at the world around you excluding certain things and including others. A lot of that is almost unconscious, because what you’re doing is you find people that are pursuing what you want to do—the work you want to make, buildings or whatever—and you’re impressed by their output. Because with great people, this is the best experience you can have with a teacher at a university: this person you admire for what they do, sure, you do what they tell you, but more than anything (it’s my thesis), you start imitating them until somehow, by osmosis, you start to acquire some of the skills—like persistence, or open-mindedness, or a way of addressing things that makes other people outside the in-group identify you as something that then gives you some sort of claim to power, whatever, right? It’s somewhere between those two things.

GP: Yeah, I mean, I think because at the core, it is a cultural shift. And so you have to have been initiated into this different way of doing things, and someone who already has gone through that has to guide you through.

But also, I think it reflects kind of a bigger shift—which I don’t know if it’s new or very old, but it’s definitely happening—which is that we sort of had a long time in the development of governance in which everything became more specialized. And so a lot of the training was around technique and the use of certain tools or manual regulation processes, sort of like pushing paper because the machine needs you to be doing that.

And now, with advances in various tech, but also in the discovery of a different approach which is definitely enabled by general-purpose computers and such, it’s not so important anymore that you have specific technical skills. And so we have kind of a disproportionate value placed on the problem-solving approach and the way of thinking over the skill set, which you can acquire really quickly or that you can delegate to AI or some other tool.

And so that makes the timeline in which you can acquire a way of thinking—superficially at least—way shorter than the timeline you need to be perfectly executing a regulatory role. And I think that looks very surprising, because we have a system that’s built around waiting in line for your turn in the hierarchy that’s often age-determined and built around the perfect knowledge of processes that are basically mechanical within a timeline.

NDA: Yeah, yeah.

GP: So I think that’s a core shift. It is cultural because it is, first of all, a change in the problem-solving approach.

NDA: Yeah, and I think that’s why—I mean, we talk to so many people across all levels of territorial governance, from residents that run a little non-profit that runs some of the cultural activity of a town, to mayors, to people who are creating local development strategies through different instruments, to regional officials and regional politicians, to even at the national level.

And what you see is not just—because we can talk about what young people feel like they need to do this work, which, as you’re saying, people are interested theoretically for a series of reasons (sometimes, I would say, even the wrong reasons, but not all; there’s a spectrum), and they’re just not sure how you work on this, what’s the work of it conceptually, right? They feel like it’s hard to get permission to try some of these theoretical ideas of territorial regeneration, let’s say, which is a more accepted term in Italy.

That’s young people. But if we go and talk to all these other people that are maybe at the top of some role—presidents of a small or large organization, or managers running a process—they all see it. Not all of them, but we’re in touch with so many people that see it and that speak to us a lot about education, and that speak to us about something innovative and kind of magnetic about these experiences that they see that we run both at the college and training level.

And it’s because I think even for them, it concretizes something that they all perceive at the peak of their careers, which is everything you described about the work. There’s more cynicism up there, of course—like “the system’s a system” or whatever—but the people that see these opportunities when they see the trainings, they’re like: “This is it.” It’s not like we’re lobbying for extra policy or an extra piece of funding for an interest group or whatnot.

The way we sort of fix territorial governance—I’m thinking of Donella Meadows right now and her leverage points essay. Once we’ve redefined what the problem is, it’s: what are the methods and objectives that we want to apply to the problem? What do we want to do with this thing that we’re thinking about? And then, once we change the objectives, it’s figuring out how we achieve those objectives using all the tools at our disposal, a lot of which are new, right?

Because I do think there’s a technology layer also to the experiences that we’ve been producing that is an important part of seeing potentials and permissionless ways of changing processes. And then, of course, arriving slowly to the idea of saying: we really need to focus not on metrics of what we did, but of what that thing we did produced.

And I think the people that are also our champions in a way, at other generational levels of the ladder, they do see the idea that we have to build armies of people that are going through this change of perspective, right? And I think that’s really exciting. It’s pretty hopeful, I would say.

GP: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s two things from the more senior perspective. One is that due to this culture of bureaucratic certification and very defined disciplinary roles and expertise, there’s a lot of “dark talent”—not in the sense that Balaji sees it as geographical dark talent (there’s definitely a lot of that, but we’re not so much tapping into that), but disciplinary dark talent. Especially for a field in which there’s no defined pipeline, you have a lot of people who would be very good at that, but they studied something else, of course, because there’s nothing you can study to do that. And they’ve been convinced that they cannot contribute anything beyond their very narrow disciplinary expertise.

NDA: Right. And so they’re locked into that.

GP: And there’s the great value of exposure. Technologically, I think that’s easy, because with new technology, since there’s no expert in that usually, you can expose everyone to that and teach everyone regardless of what they studied. Except for extremely technical fields, when there’s a breakthrough, no one has claimed it yet, and so you can expose everyone to it and everyone feels like they can learn it because there’s no expert that owns the space.

And so that allows this exchange across these disciplinary barriers that are very artificial, and you quickly figure out that a smart person can learn most things pretty quickly and can start acquiring skills and methods from other disciplines and applying them to this new space.

And so I think a lot of that revelation comes from this arbitrage—a disciplinary arbitrage of dark talent. And that’s something that works really well about the trainings: by removing the disciplinary filter on who can participate and actually actively pursuing multidisciplinarity and multiple levels of abstraction in the kinds of jobs that affect a territory that we’re looking for in the participants, as we said, people don’t work across all the levels.

When you mix that with a redefinition of what the work is at the beginning of the workshop—like what is a territory, even very simply—you force, for that brief period of time, everyone to abandon the argumentative conventions of their discipline: what’s right and what’s wrong, what can and can’t be done, what’s fair and not fair. And it brings it all to first principles.

We somehow create the situation where you can disagree at the end of the thing with what we did—at the end you can say, “This was not a valuable impact that we tried to have, who cares”—but until you get to the end, the only thing that the table of people collaborating on solving a problem together with a mentor can do is measure themselves against the ability to solve the problem, and see to what degree they can apply the newly received common thinking of what the problem is in order to do that in the best way. And really be your best self, be the best member of a team, excel, and compete. There are all these different ways in which people approach these opportunities, but it really is an incredible space.

And I think today for me, the big takeaway is the idea that you’re creating a discipline, and that’s what allows all these things. And you do need those partners across the generational ladder: the younger people (and people younger than you) that will entertain your crazy ideas and decide whether their enthusiasm aligns with their spiritual quest as an 18- or 19-year-old, all the way up to the people that are at the peak of their decision-making power.

You really need all of those: you need people across that whole ladder to believe in the idea of “we’re actually founding something new here.” And maybe the vehicles through which it’ll start to establish itself are not exact—we never go for a grant and say “we’re doing [x].” We try to explain what we’re doing in terms that are understandable to the partner at play or the opportunity, right, or to what they are interested in learning as a student, while slowly bringing them into: “Wow, this is that and then some.”

I think this helps us really think about those steps of what those transformations are: can we name in very specific ways what those transformations are that need to happen in the perspective of the participant? We need to go from re-understanding the problem all the way to building personal self-confidence and not being depressed by the bureaucracy or something like that.

That’s one level of what happens inside there that is really about opening someone’s eyes. And that’s what happens before, which I think we plainly described as: we are giving you a protocol that’s already baked so we can, in a soft way, walk you through it, so we focus on your ability to understand this whole thing rather than on the stress of figuring out what happens after.

Why is it important that we continue to cultivate a membership, for example, of our organization, or a peer group, if it’s not a formal profession that brings together these people after they’ve joined the journey, if they’ve decided to sign up after the exposure? It’s not a standard discipline, it’s not geography—it’s this other discipline.

And so when they go work—some of them in a regional planning department, some of them in a municipality—what is it that allows them to exist in these extraneous organizations that are not really pursuing this discipline, that have their own institutional objectives that are complementary but don’t center on this thing? It’s not like we’re training architects to be architects, where an institute of architects lobbies for them and provides a service that only they can provide—that’s not what we’re saying.

We’re returning to classical virtues that need to be instilled because simply technical training or bureaucratic training isn’t enough to do the job. Everyone sees that at all levels and all generations. So you instill these new virtues, you create this new space, but then everyone goes off to do jobs that are not regulated like the work of an architect. So you need a glue, because that’s what allows you to fight with all the resistance of the system to evolve, where everything feels like a Gordian knot.

GP: Well, I mean, I think if the first step is that of dismantling one’s view—it’s like an act of humility and abandoning this sense of entitlement where “I studied this thing, and so I must be able in my life to practice this exact thing.”

NDA: Yeah, we all have to go through it.

GP: We all have to accept that, well, actually maybe there’s a problem for you to solve that’s much more interesting, that’s not named anything close to what you studied and were thinking of doing with your life, but you have to work on it and solve it.

The other aspect is the sense of agency, which is also what gives meaning to a membership and to the research: this system is something that we build. If you’re alone in this governance megastructure, you’re not going to change it, because you suffer from the consequences of a system that you haven’t contributed to building. But if you have a different vision for how that could work, and you have a network of people that have shared vision and see that they can contribute to a change, then the network, the membership, and the research become an opportunity to advance that vision with a shared sense of purpose.

I think that’s a great value out of this: you learn a different way of working and approaching the problem, you feel like you can do it, and then it’s not like you’re sent alone wherever you end up getting a job. You are on your own there, but there are many other people in your situation that are trying to reimagine the practice of territorial governance at different levels through these frameworks that they have contributed to developing.

I don’t think that will change even in the scaling of the training. I don’t think we’re going to get anytime soon to fully baked, static things, because it takes decades.

NDA: Yeah. Because if you’re starting any sort of social group or interest group—a discipline is an example of that, but there are other cultural ones—it always starts diasporic. You have all these people—think about modernist architecture: that’s not a totally new discipline, but it was a radical transformation of an existing discipline that was architecture. They gather in some spaces for limited times because those spaces are not self-sustaining; they are cultural, academic, or other kinds of institutions. And then they all have to go out and build things and work with existing protocols, socio-technical systems, and the current consensus on what an architect is and how they build.

And it doesn’t look like you can actually affect creating a discipline if you don’t have some sort of heart—a home base that everyone can come back to every once in a while, or in the age of the internet, remain connected to in one way or another, whether it’s a network or the continual development of the DNA of the discipline through applied research for challenges. It’s extremely necessary because you can never gain takeoff if someone comes for 5 or 20 days, participates in a training, maybe comes on board for a challenge working on an indeterminate problem, and then you just say, “Okay, great, that was it.” That person can’t continue that cultural, disciplinary project in their own space because naturally they’ll have a mimetic tendency to be consumed by their context.

So we have always been questioning: “Can we build an organization on culture alone?” And our answer has always been no, looking rather for something that works, that moves a needle. That’s really been a North Star for us. But what we’re seeing is that as that North Star is emerging, the cultural dimension is really important to make sure that we can compound all the energies.

Maybe that’s a good place to call it, because we’re coming up against the hour.

GP: Yeah, I mean, one last thing that came to mind: if you think of the Bauhaus, before you had industrial designers who were dedicatedly trained in industrial design and not transplants from other disciplines, it took like 20 years. But in the process, you had a lot of people who were contributing to the emergence of a new way.

I think that’s very similar to what we’re doing: it’s the construction of a culture that maybe ossifies into a discipline eventually, but first and foremost contaminates all the sibling disciplines that come close to it throughout its development process.

NDA: Yeah, and it’s multipolar, right? It’s easy retrospectively to reconstruct a discipline through a linear track of spaces, organizations, and individuals, but it’s always more complicated than that. It’s a lot of contaminated projects trying to pursue the same thing, giving it different names at different moments in time—too early, too late, in the right place, in the wrong place.

From our perspective, the most important thing is to build one of those spaces, because that can make enough noise and produce enough real value that it naturally starts to find its cousins. Where that discipline flourishes and through what institutional architectures is harder to have the ambition of owning—nor is it even that interesting to try to own that, because those are organizations that come after. First you have the discipline, and then that discipline builds its architectures in order to really do its kind of work. That’s a separate layer that is usually owned by a different series of new or existing institutions.

So yeah, we have to keep an eye out for our cousins. But in order to find them, we need to make sure that we continue the effort to not forget the cultural dimension, and to pursue it in parallel as the training programs start to grow the audience of people curious with one foot in and one foot out of the institutional project that we have, right?

GP: Well, yeah, amazing.

NDA: Okay, well, let’s go ahead and end on what we always end on: “the next one is Lorenzetti.” Maybe it is, maybe life around us throws us in different directions and inspires different conversations, but we’ll give that one a shot next time.

GP: Let me hope.

NDA: It might or might not be Lorenzetti. Talk soon.

GP: Talk soon. Bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit liminalfutures.substack.com

This conversation argues that much of contemporary architecture operates as a cargo cult: it produces the images of flourishing territories—beautiful spaces, reconstructed towns, well-tended squares—without the social and economic systems that generate them. Beauty, it contends, is not a goal but a signal—the reading Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted into the Allegory of Good and Bad Government—and recovering the ability to act on what produces it requires reclaiming an older, nearly abandoned lineage of the discipline, tentatively traced here from the scholastic builders of Panofsky‘s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, through Alberti, to the planetary infrastructures of Bratton‘s The Stack: the architect not only as maker of buildings, but as steersman of the complex systems.

The conversation took place between Nicolas Delgado Alcega and Gabriele Pizzi following the lecture at Terremosse SESAMxAmatrice and its mixed reception by the design audience. The lecture was based on Pizzi’s retrospective on five years of work at Liminal.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit liminalfutures.substack.com

This conversation argues that the proper output of work on fragile territories is neither the plan, nor the paper, nor even the toolkit, but the protocol: a codification of flows of labor, matter, information, and attention that turns one-off, situated innovations into persistent, replicable, and composable routines. Positioned between Whitehead’s dictum that civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking of them and the expanded definition of protocols emerging from the Protocol Institute, it reframes territorial capacity-building as protocolization.

The conversation took place between Nicolas Delgado Alcega and Gabriele Pizzi while GP drafts a coming piece on protocolization, as part of an ongoing process of institutional clarification alongside pieces on the challenge methodology, the applied research organization, and the redefinition of territory begun in GP’s retrospective on work at Liminal.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit liminalfutures.substack.com

This lecture argues that our design disciplines are declining not for lack of talent or relevance but for lack of collective intelligence: the functional institutions that turn shared values into coordinated action. It proposes that renewing them requires building new organizations, as Liminal is attempting to do in response to territorial fragility in Italy.

The lecture was delivered by Nicolas Delgado Alcega for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale on September 2nd, as part of the Gens Public Programme at the Arsenale.

Good afternoon. My name is Nicolas Delgado Alcega, and I am the vice-president of an organization called Liminal. Today I am going to share with you some of our thoughts on the importance of institutions to our design disciplines, as well as how we are responding to the current institutional landscape through our work.

There is an overall phenomenon of institutional decline today. Trust in institutions and their narratives is quite low, and there is increasing awareness that this is, if not a serious problem, at least a real description of our situation. This is tied to the amount of time that has passed since the last cycle of institutional renewal, and the resulting accrual of bureaucratic complexity that is hindering rather than enabling our institutions from pursuing their original mission, or even their revised ones.

This issue is also tied to a series of disruptive contextual conditions that are putting pressure on our socio-technical systems as their agility reduces.

* Technological acceleration

Obsolescence threatens every system

* Elite replacement struggles

The changing power balance is now visible

* Environmental stresses

Territorial management strategies are shifting

* Demographic inversion

Rapid growth is giving way to global contraction

There is the speed at which technology is changing the way we perform processes of all kinds, threatening our systems with obsolescence on a daily basis. There is an ongoing struggle that is natural to societies that are not managing, or don’t even know how to talk about, the processes of elite replacement and renewal that are taking place. There are environmental and climatic changes that are demanding, primarily, that we reinvent the way we govern territories and resources. And, last but not least, there is the transition from a long arc of growth-oriented populations and economies into the struggles of contraction — a phenomenon that historically has been attributed to developed societies, but which is showing itself already at a global scale and across all classes of GDP.

So let’s say we are dealing with a series of significant shifts that we either don’t know how to solve, or don’t even have the theoretical frameworks to analyze, because it has been so long since we’ve had to deal with them in incumbent nations. Although perhaps some version of this framing is already in everyone’s mind, the degree to which institutional renewal is the main problem that awaits our action is either less obvious, or just feels like something too complex for any one of us to tackle. This is particularly true as institutional environments feel increasingly like competitive, zero-sum games, and the spiritual crisis of solitude that is enveloping our societies manifests professionally too. So the feeling that “I don’t have time or hope in fixing a larger system, and all I can do is look out for myself and maybe not harm others along the way” seems to be the prevalent approach.

So let’s bring this reflection into the institutions of our disciplinary domain — that of design: our academies, our professional associations, our cultural and discursive venues like this one. We are captured by an unending wave of crises. Crises that flow from every corner of the planet. Crises of every kind and genre. Crises that always come from the outside. Crises that, despite where we may stand in relation to one issue or another, we feel we must engage — not just out of our firm moral compasses, but also out of a social and professional instinct of self-preservation.

This is the first elephant in the room that we all know about, but seldom speak about plainly. Anyone who is engaged with our disciplinary institutions is aware of how much space and energy we dedicate to discussing the crisis of the day, many times with genuine good intentions. But ultimately, how much of our institutions’ behavior stops at risk mitigation after these conversations? How difficult is it proving for these structured systems, built to pursue our common interest — even when leadership has, let’s say, the right answer to a given problem — to address any one issue at hand? How hard, even, is it proving to perform the internal reforms that could increase our institutions’ operational capability? And how much of the palliative decision-making is only further deteriorating our institutional capacity — that powerful ability our institutions have of exerting influence over a problem area?

Why is it that, when we walk the halls of our institutions or sit in on their events, we sometimes feel as if we are inside a Gordian knot? Why is the spark in the eyes of so many of our senior and most talented researchers, professors, professional advocates and public figures looking a bit dull in public, as of late? And why has every conversation become a tad guarded?

Think for a moment of when you have a problem at home. Something pragmatic, but at the scale of your own personal life, important. Think about how it feels when you procrastinate gathering the courage to tackle this problem, or even worse, acknowledging that it is there. Think about how, in this information age of ours, you transfer your concern, your courage, the space in your mind, to any one of the abhorrent events unfolding across the globe right now. And think of how that problem at home silently, but surely, continues to grow and get worse. How it becomes harder and harder for you to solve every minute that you dedicate your attention to other matters. And think of how, despite your most sincere concern for those faraway issues, your concerns rarely affect them, and your ability to one day tackle them diminishes as your own home base deteriorates.

Isn’t this what we see happening within the institutions of our design disciplines and profession, to some degree at least?

I’m not here to polemicize, to provide the absolute list of major issues that threaten both the institutional capacity and overall survival of our organizations, or even to offer a roadmap that may or may not be fit for the individual conditions of a given institution. I’m here to say that we can all see the enormous elephants crowding the room, and the majority of us know their real names — whether we are students, guild members, professors, directors, trustees, political appointees, or what may be. If we cannot reconfigure our institutions to this radically new context that they are operating within, it is unlikely that they will be able to deliver the extraordinary value that, up until this point, they have been capable of delivering.

Our design disciplines don’t suffer from an incapacity to attract talented individuals, from aloofness to the problems of the world, or from a limited potential to affect problems that concern the built environment. They don’t even lag so much behind technological developments, especially as we enter this new age that focuses computing power on the problems of the physical world.

What our design disciplines lack is this so-called collective intelligence. We can see collective intelligence all around us. The origin of our discipline is rooted in our ability to understand complexity in the world and organize it to produce discrete, technically and artistically impressive interventions in the built environment. But can we say that our ability to share a sort of collective intelligence has increased in the past fifty years? That even within specific schools or publications, agreement over the basic principles that define our interactions — those that even define our disagreements — has strengthened overall? I’m personally not so sure. And my conversations with figures leading schools and departments over the past fifty years verify this intuition.

Collective intelligence presupposes four conditions: a group of actors that share space and resources; a collection of individual self-interests and pursuits that belong to these actors; a common objective that is both rooted in shared values and in the belief that collaborative action will positively enhance the self-interest of each actor; and a carefully designed system of protocols that regulates and rewards behavior by individuals who pursue the common objective. In short, in the field of human coordination — which is certainly at the center of the work we do as designers — collective intelligence is best represented by the formation, cultivation and reform of institutions. If loose networks and emergent orders shape the context in which we operate as designers, institutions determine our ability to produce long-lasting, coordinated responses to that context.

* Actors sharing resources

* A collection of distinct pursuits and self-interests

* A common objective

* A system of protocols that conspires towards it

So if, as we develop a novel understanding of the complex intelligence of natural systems and accelerate the capacity of synthetic forms of intelligence, our own capacity for collective action is decreasing — isn’t the most important task at hand the reform of our disciplines and their institutions? So that we can increase our stake in the game, pursue all these grand visions and take on all these important problems we are only just scratching the surface of? And if that is the case — leaving aside the revolutionary and avant-garde ideological approaches that feel dated today — how do we proceed with this process of reform?

It’s not clear that internal reform of the incumbent institutions will lead the way in this challenge, and perhaps that is what paralyzes many of us engaged with them. If we look at academia, history is full of cases that show this is not the case. Intellect and talent, the most valuable resources of an academic institution, have a tendency to flee when they see events unfold like the ones we are experiencing. As historian Niall Ferguson has demonstrated, it happened to the British medieval universities, which eventually saw themselves overtaken by their German counterparts in the 19th century. Better known to us, it also happened to the German universities, from which some of the most talented minds in the world migrated to invigorate American universities in the 20th century and help them become today’s incumbents. A transition, this last one, that happened just about one hundred years ago, during a time that, according to many authors, shares many indicators with our own.

The problem is not whether this will happen or not. The problem our best minds and leaders need to be asking themselves is: how does institutional renewal happen? How has it happened within our discipline over the past ten centuries? And how do we accelerate the path to a future state where our institutional capacity has been renewed and adapted to the world we are already living in?

The transition between the Beaux-Arts and the Modern Movement was perhaps the last full cycle of institutional supplantation that took place in the Western context. Most of us know this history, but it’s worth revisiting briefly from the perspective of the process of institutional renewal. The late 19th century was characterized by a consolidated architectural culture that was significantly shaped by Beaux-Arts academies. These were not just revivalist schools, places of superficial eclecticism, as may seem at first glance from our perspective today.

As Jorge Silvetti has often stated to me in the past few years, Beaux-Arts academies were places where a sophisticated cultural and aesthetic project of continuity was fostered — where the myriad of architectural forms from different periods and geographies that had their origin in the tectonic language were studied using Enlightenment methods of scientific classification, and were originally theorized and redeployed through a system of composition, a form of practice, we may say.

In many ways, Beaux-Arts academies were responding to the emerging philosophical, cultural, and functional complexities that their time demanded. However, it is undeniable that the accelerated rise of urban, industrial society — and an elite replacement that, as Bourdieu teaches us, demanded the transformation of taste and aesthetics in the process — put pressure on the Beaux-Arts tradition, on its institutions, and on its leaders. More than a direct affront, the myriad of new problem areas and possibilities emerging during the early 20th century were outside the realm of what the Beaux-Arts intellectual system was able to incorporate whilst preserving internal consistency.

So if Beaux-Arts institutions could not give space to the development of emerging ideas without compromising their own basic tenets, where did the culture of the Modern Movement emerge in Europe?

A culture which, whatever one may say about it, did unlock a great deal of the opportunities that design disciplines then exploited throughout the 20th century — from industrial design, to territorial planning, to the rise of urban design and our current conception of the profession of landscape architecture. It emerged through the formation of new organizations: through associations like the Werkbund, through independent journals like De Stijl and L’Esprit Nouveau, through new experimental schools like the Bauhaus, and through self-organized networks and congresses like CIAM.

These organizations, which generally lasted 10 to 30 years, are where the most talented, competitive, and present-aligned individuals spent their time. Where they ran their experiments and flushed out ideas that incumbents struggled to properly support, for as complex a set of reasons as our own today. Where they built up a reputation, and more importantly, where they grew a culture around a new way of thinking about the design disciplines. Places where they fostered the internal and external social networks necessary to give scale to a new and emerging common project.

These spaces were not immune to the broader social upheavals that captured Europe in the 1930s. But this only opened up the opportunity for the next step in the process of institutional reform. And we all know that the consolidation of the influence of the Modern Movement happens in America, where not only do we see the continuation of organizational experiments in prolific places like Black Mountain College, but more importantly — thanks to a few curious individuals who had participated in the networks of these nimble organizations in Europe — the capture of institutions like Harvard, Yale, and IIT, and later on the fold of the rest of the Ivy League. Not only powerful and well-funded pulpits from which to continue the development, socialization, and proliferation of Modernist ideas, but also well-integrated institutions within a nation positioned to surpass all other players on the global stage in most fields, at least for the next fifty years.

Once enough evidence about this new intellectual and cultural movement was circling around on the outside, some established institutions saw the need to reform themselves in their natural, institutional interest of self-preservation. And in the interest of attracting the best talent and retaining capacity for the production of excellent ideas and human capital, they went beyond survival. Many — the case of our design schools at Harvard and Yale being key examples — ostensibly became more powerful and effective institutions than they had ever been up until that point. On the other hand, those that didn’t enact reform, even when the evidence had been laid out by these nimble organizations making better progress out on the field, are today mostly known to scholars.

We must remember that all of this institutional reconfiguration within our disciplines happened during a period of intense political instability, rising authoritarianism, debt crises, trade wars, and cycles of near and faraway wars. Fraught moments in which the long-term planning that designing for the built environment requires was either scarce or fraught with moral and political complexity. In which real intellectuals had fewer narratives they could honestly lean against, in which there were fewer hero clients, and so on. But what resulted was enormous and timely: a professional and intellectual reconfiguration primed for the long post-war era that was to follow.

Setting aside our post-modern, post-everything polemics about the merits and faults of the post-war world, and focusing solely on the question of its institutional capacity, we must admit that these institutional projects yielded exactly what many of us crave today but feel powerless in our ability to acquire: the ability to make large, concrete impacts on problem areas that we are committed to. To shape the built environment in the image of our highest ideals, and to do it in the company of stakeholders — from clients to end users — who share in this vision. And to do this, through collective coordination, at a large enough scale that the world starts to look substantially different as we move through it.

So, coming back to us: where are we today, and what should we be up to as a consequence? To answer that, let’s assume the following for a moment. That functional institutions are necessary systems to foster collective intelligence and build its pathways to action. That institutions bureaucratize and ossify over time, reducing their ability to both pursue their original mission and adapt to a changing context. That institutional renewal is a cyclical process happening on century-long timescales. That the flight of talent and new experiments in organizational and institutional formation lead the way when incumbent institutions are put under pressure by external forces. That once new players in an institutional field of action create a form of competition that cannot be ignored, incumbents reform out of sheer necessity or die. And that once a cycle of renewal has taken place, with reformed incumbents now well established, a myriad of new opportunities unlock themselves, permitting the growth and consolidation of surviving players — which then makes it so that forming new institutions during this period of consolidation becomes increasingly difficult and unattractive for the parties needed to form them.

* Fostering collective intelligence requires functional institutions

* Institutions bureaucratize and ossify over time

* Institutional renewal is a cyclical process

* Talent flight and new organizational experiments lead the way

* Incumbents reform out of sheer necessity or die

* After reform, surviving players enter a growth and consolidation phase

* Rise of new organizations declines during periods of consolidation

If this is a valid description of the behavior and life cycle of institutions, then we are certainly somewhere around this point in the cycle. Overall, we are seeing fatigue inside our academic, professional and cultural institutions; rising bureaucratic rather than meritocratic competitiveness and output; a lack of basic intellectual and moral consensus within formal and informal decision-making spaces; and declining overall bargaining power with external actors. Most importantly of all, though, the flight of some of our best minds.

Our best minds are going to three kinds of places today. The first are the most well-preserved project-spaces in the profession — sectors where the most canonical value of our work as spatial designers is still recognized today, mostly by individuals. The second are more functional institutional spaces that belong to other disciplines, where some of our skills can be put to use to solve different kinds of problems. And the third, most strange but telling of them all, are hybrid academic and professional organizations experimenting with narrow problem areas.

* Well-preserved professional spaces

* Other disciplines with more functional institutions

* Hybrid organizations experimenting within narrow problem-areas

There is a rapid multiplication of this last kind of flight, which is creating a plethora of experiments whose common characteristic is that they are tinkering with one or another variable of the conditions under which we learn, research or deliver design products. There are still not that many examples of organizational experiments seriously competing with incumbent institutions. And most experiments feel contrived, or at best inefficient vehicles to deliver a kind of value that the broader context is not yet structured to easily accommodate. But the institutions are certainly starting to take note, and to build bridges that may come in handy to them later on. These experiments are usually rising first with the cultural institutions like this one, then the academic ones, and finally the professional ones — which is likely due to the amount of space that each of these kinds of institutions is able to give over to entertaining new ideas and fostering experimentation based on their mandates.

The observations up to this point are reflections that we have slowly developed over the past five years in response, first and foremost, to our own empirical experience. And because one day we turned around and found ourselves inside this latest camp, this third camp that I just described. So I want to walk you through now what the journey has been for us, working within Italian fragile territories experiencing depopulation and disinvestment — what all of this theoretical understanding of the problem looks like as we react to it in practice.

Liminal is an organization we founded in 2021 with the objective of developing methods and tools that can be used to catalyze territorial regeneration processes in territories characterized by fragility. It was born out of three primary concerns on our minds as we came fresh out of grad school during the pandemic: population decline in fragile territories, where the self-feeding loops of actor interaction that lead to renewal are already particularly weak; brain drain, due to the inability of existing private and public structures to absorb talent; and an overall leadership crisis within public institutions that is broadly felt today.

We thought that we could turn these three problems into opportunities, and design an organization that could funnel the young talent necessary to enact processes of territorial regeneration; find in these territories challenging problems that require new perspectives and technical skills; and collaborate with public institutions to help implement well-intentioned policies that usually fail when they hit the ground.

We were also thinking about the mega-trends that we thought were unlikely to change in the short term within the European context, and which we needed to grapple with if we wanted to do something useful. These were the current rate of technological progress already alluded to, that would promote social disaggregation in the medium term and consolidate existing forms of centralized management in the long run. But we saw a lot of opportunities too. The more we have learned firsthand about the challenges faced by fragile rural territories, the more we became aware that there were many trends in the world that could change the narrative for these areas that have struggled to find a structural function within the Italian national tissue since the early 20th century. However, we also realized that many real barriers existed between the reality today and the more geographically distributed prosperity that these opportunities could generate.

And so, like many of these organizational experiments, Liminal was started by a small group of friends with similar values and a common interest in the topic of territorial regeneration. But Liminal has evolved away from the collective or firm structure that many projects in our camp follow. We have adopted a nearly forgotten model of intellectual and cultural inquiry called the society. Liminal is made up of three tiers of individuals: a governing board concerned with steering the organization based on a long-term vision; an operative team that handles everyday affairs and tries to make the vision a reality; and a membership that brings the organization alive, contributing all of their expertise through discrete, time-bound formats.

Over the past five years, we have carefully curated a membership for our society to make sure we get the cultural DNA of Liminal right, and avoid building a space characterized by the cacophony that has become normative in so many of our institutional spaces. They are individuals who share in the overall vision we are pursuing; who believe in the value of developing and rewarding excellence; who avoid a priori political reasonings or categorizations, and who instead approach issues with a sincere conviction that is informed by open-mindedness and a willingness for genuine dialogue. They are generally people with a fearless, action-oriented spirit. And collectively, they make up the broad, multidisciplinary pool of expertise that may come in handy as we tackle the issues of territorial regeneration from different angles. So we have planners, landscape architects and architects, but also graphic designers, computer scientists, geographers, business managers, agronomists, environmental scientists, humanitarian workers, and the list goes on — today, a membership of about fifty individuals.

Our mission is then operationalized through two kinds of formats: Assemblies and Challenges.

Our Assembly is an annual gathering, open to all our members, where we travel to Italian territories in which we can see territorial regeneration at play. We update on our roadmaps, share with each other what we have been individually up to, and travel locally to see best practices at play. We go to get inspired — whether we go to see a hydroelectric power plant producing surplus renewable energy in a territory, a cooperative building markets for products that make up the territory’s traditional food biodiversity, or individual small enterprises that act as lighthouses as they begin to thrive in very challenging economic circumstances. We socialize our membership, prompting dialogue through experiences that surface the potential for our shared work.

Then there are the Challenges, which is where the thick of our time is spent. Challenges are short, applied research and prototyping formats through which we deliver pragmatic solutions to issues keeping territories from the self-sustaining processes of territorial regeneration that we aim for. They explore grand issues through fieldwork and participatory processes, but steer clear of grand solutions and narratives. Instead, each Challenge takes on a narrow problem that is theoretically solvable within the timeframe of a single Challenge — usually six to eighteen days on the ground and four more weeks online — and with the organizational resources at our current disposal. Challenges slowly hammer at specific issues and potentials, and are conceived as just one step that unlocks the next actionable area of work. They focus on solving problems through methods that can be scaled and repeated, so each one can add a tool to the broader toolkit that we set out to create.

Just to give you an example: Digital Paths was a Challenge through which we went into the field to create orthophotographic images and 360 footage to improve digital wayfinding in small historic centers with a limited digital footprint. Involving community youth, we mapped four towns, one street at a time, holding 360 cameras over our heads, and we figured out how to effectively and significantly increase the available street geometry and Street View footage on platforms like Google Maps — sometimes exceeding a 90% increase in coverage for these centers. This facilitated access to points of interest for visitors, and helped increase overall willingness to visit these forgotten territories by making them more visible and predictable from afar.

We felt, as we did this work, that design research had been so detached from reality when we were graduate students. Problems felt overly theorized and sometimes outright invented. This is why being in the field, collecting our own data, and engaging stakeholders felt important to the structure we had given Challenges. But it is also the reason why we have invested quite some time in understanding how to measure the impact of our work — so it can tell us whether we are on track to make a relevant and timely contribution to the problem areas that we center our attention on. Every Challenge has an impact framework that theorizes the outcome we want, forces us to think about how a specific output will contribute to that outcome, and requires that we develop indicators to measure whether these outcomes and outputs were effectively produced or not. So we measure the impact of each Challenge across the different areas that we want to make an impact upon, starting from our ability to foster the development of expertise within our membership, and moving out onto ways of supporting individual stakeholders, fostering collaboration on the territory, and increasing the informational legibility necessary to attract new actors and investment to the area.

This recursive iteration of Challenges and impact assessment over the past 11 cycles has led us to refine a methodology that defines the Challenge format. A methodology that began with bits and pieces of approaches we had seen elsewhere, and which increasingly reflects the priorities we set for Challenges at the get-go, and the lessons that reality on the ground has been teaching us. It is an organizational asset that we are now in the process of theorizing, so we can be ready to disseminate it amongst our members and retain alignment as the time to scale our membership arrives.

So I want to briefly walk you through an example of how this idea of a method — that hacks at one tiny bit of a problem at a time in order to unearth what a broader, functional toolkit needs to be for these places — actually works. Once we realized how we could improve the ability and willingness of visitors to navigate these territories, we asked ourselves how we could systematize our data collection for the sake of efficiency and scalability. We figured out we could help not just visitors, but residents as well: fixing all kinds of road metadata to minimize the everyday nuances that the transit of tourists creates for medieval historic centers, but also creating accurate civic-number databases that properly reflect the location of private addresses — not just points of interest, but also for use by service providers — ensuring that emergency response, package delivery, and even utility updates are performed more smoothly in rural communities, where some of these pragmatic issues are everyday struggles for residents.

We’ve then been pairing this data-centric approach with a great quantity of engagement. Engagement with local actors, but also with big businesses, with politicians, with regional bureaucratic departments and cultural institutions — trying to understand what territorial stewardship really means in practice, and where we can render ourselves useful. And pairing the insight developed through bilateral human interaction with precise cartographic and analytical tools to get a sense of the bigger picture. Then thinking about what it means to develop territorial strategies in fragile territories with fragmented actor networks, and applying a service-design approach to territorial strategy through which we can develop plans that are ambitious but acupunctural; systemic in their thinking, but grounded in the limited human resources of the territory, their individual aspirations, and their ability to collaborate.

Then, developing territorial destination websites that synthesize a distinct territorial identity based on what these actors have to offer — building a pathway to connect individual businesses and actors to end users in areas that are pursuing the path of rural tourism economies; a first trickle of interest and energy to verify where the single elements of a broader strategy could meet a market demand. And then getting down to the problem of developing detailed project proposals that can render parts of the strategy fundable, aligning catalytic elements of the strategy with the incentive systems of instruments like the European Union’s A Soil Deal for Europe or the EU CAP Network’s LEADER model. And, in the meantime, breaking down components of this strategy, better understanding and describing the component parts. To then explore these on the ground, walk the territory in further detail, and experience firsthand what it takes to render specific features — like a trail, for example — navigable and maintainable through real incentives.

To then get back to the digital: to populate not just traditional wayfinding platforms, but also more specific ones, rendering the territory more visible once again, but this time with specific aims — like encouraging foot traffic on underexplored trails of the territory to keep this infrastructure alive. And then to shift our attention to the nodes of a single strategy, to work on enterprise-facilitation processes with individuals and families trying to build products and services locally, to render their territory more functional and thus the overall strategy more viable. Helping them assess their needs, structure business models, develop short- and medium-term roadmaps, and write bankable business plans to borrow or raise funds for the next phase of their business. And, pushing it one step further, helping them tailor their graphic identity across a variety of physical and digital formats to their different clients and partners — helping them improve the way they present their small enterprises to the world. And, with this in hand, using our developed stakeholder networks to assist them in connecting with the right people on the territory to give their ideas traction.

And then, finally, to take the big picture again: to figure out how what we see at a fine level of detail on the ground can become data that is interpretable at the policy-making level. Developing careful indicators for building-level typology, occupancy, and condition that can be derived from visual indicators using image-recognition software, so that we can provide granular diagnostics of building fabric in territories with severe demographic declines. And packaging these diagnostics through digestible policy briefs that the sector can easily absorb.

This is what the iterative, problem-centric, multidisciplinary approach that we are developing is yielding: many output types that solve compound, territorially centered issues, incrementally building up the preconditions for a self-sustaining territorial regeneration. All of this is enabled by a series of protocols and incentive systems that we have intentionally built into our organization — not least of which is careful reporting of what methods each Challenge develops, what progress it achieves, and what further lines of action it unearths for future activity within a thematic or territorial area of focus.

The team, the iteration, and the expertise developed to date now allow us to understand quite well where progress needs to be made to further our organizational aims, who needs to be on board, and who is really benefiting from key aspects of the work we’re doing. And so, now that we have that, we can take advantage of forthcoming opportunities to make a jump in the size of individual fundings for applied research initiatives — so we can include iterative Challenge sequences within an area of focus, allowing us to create stronger consortia of partners, produce larger outputs, and move increasingly from digital to physical outputs, continuing to expand our organizational expertise. And also develop the academic publications to validate the work and enter the research-and-innovation-environment pipelines — but now with something to show — consolidating the financial stability of our institutional architecture that has enabled these four years of experimentation.

And as we land on these primary objectives, we are also beginning to experiment with the future arms of this organization: exploring industry partnerships to scale the impact of verified solutions that can be delivered as services; and designing educational products that closely align skill-building with needs identified in the sector we’re operating in, some experiments for which are already underway. This would allow us to reweave the relationship between research, education, and industry for this narrow area of focus that we’re working in, positioning ourselves as an organization with the potential to perhaps one day reach institutional scale.

What I’ve walked you through today is just one of many experiments out there — our attempt to go beyond experimentation, beyond collaboration, and into our humble exercise in institutional coordination. In crafting organizations capable not only of fostering individual creativity, but also of aligning drive, interdisciplinary expertise, and shared values to produce actual, measurable, sustained impact within the area that we dedicate our work to. But my concluding thoughts go beyond the singular success that we may — or, if history tells us something, may not — have on this journey.

We all sense the regime of spiritual crisis under which we live. That is perhaps the deepest expression of the compound of issues that I have described today. That crisis comes from a feeling of meaninglessness and cosmic loneliness. From a cynical disbelief that anything can be, and is worth, edifying; that there are transcendental projects out there. Or, even worse, from a belief in something seemingly transcendent, without access to any of the structures that can channel our energy in its direction.

This puts us in a bit of a pickle, and gets us speaking nonsense — designers that we are. As a discipline that has an uncorrectable bias towards socio-technically complex, long-term projects that are edifying, and that seek to express the highest ambitions of the individuals and entities that embark upon them in the built environment.

So there is no easy way to fix this. And that act of resistance — of pushing back a wave that will, in one way or another, pass through us — is not the route, in our view. It may be better to turn your back on the chaos. To find problems that matter to you but that also ignite your passion. To surround yourself with others who share the same concerns and passions. And to accompany one another in discovering, one failure at a time, just how hard it is to make a dent in an issue. And to build up together a container that keeps together all of those practices and behaviors that lead to the odd success here and there. To use that container to iterate, over and over, involving more passionate people, developing more area-specific know-how. And to foster those connections with the world beyond that starts to see value in what you are producing and wants to deploy or use it to support its own ends.

This is really what building a family is. But it’s also what building up our disciplinary institutions, again, can be. A creative act of collaborative regeneration rather than a struggle. That is the true nature of the cycle. We just have to look at it with enough distance to notice how those tensions that we see are minor and meaningless frictions that present themselves along the way.

Every period we live through asks something different of us. This is what I believe the present is asking of all of us. It is what we are learning to build as we create our own version of the house. And it is, more than anything, a thrilling and demanding journey that moves us enormously.

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