IF THE PUBLIC IS LOST, CAN WE BUILD IT BACK?
Bruno Latour warned us that it’s not just facts that have collapsed — it’s the very idea of a shared world. When climate, health, and infrastructure all fall into disrepair, it’s not just material loss. It’s a loss of orientation. Of “we.”
But what if rebuilding the public starts with tools? With teams solving air quality in schools, enforcing justice, designing systems that reconnect people to place, to planet, to each other?
These are prototypes for public imagination — experiments in coherence, stitched together in real time.
Still, we ask: Can the public be rebuilt by those outside formal politics? Is the work of civic meaning something you can launch, scale, and iterate? Or does the very idea of building the public reduce it to something it’s not?
