Voglia di democrazia. Progetti di quartiere e deliberazione pubblica a Novara

[Machine translation] The desire for democracy refers both to desire, to nostalgia for what is lacking, and to constructive impetus, to the commitment to fill this absence. The deliberative democracy experiment that took place in Novara between 2012 and 2016, presented in this volume, was measured in both dimensions. In the SPEdD project, public deliberation is seen as a possible way to go beyond the sense of dissatisfaction, frustration and powerlessness of citizens with regard to collective life and institutions, discovering different ways of dialoguing between individuals, discussing common problems and developing, starting from neighborhoods, shared solutions and projects capable of producing collective goods and generating social cohesion. These new instances and responses of collective participation, which take very different forms than in the past, can be a good starting point for dealing with the more global issue of the crisis of effectiveness of our democracies.