Liminal Dialogues

Liminal
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Arts
  • Weekly

liminal is an applied research organization building territorial statecraft capacity in fragile territories liminalfutures.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Does Trust Scale?

    Liminal Dialogues is our weekly exercise in building theory by wandering: Gabriele and Nicolas think out loud through whatever they happen to be reading and see what holds. This week it is Thomas More’s Utopia, Francesco Patrizi’s meritocratic republic and Will Manidis’s Commanding Heights. The wandering includes the problems with More’s island monastery turned polity, why every projection of AI-driven power still rests on place-based trust, and why its possible to live within a society in which citizenship costs nothing, but it isn’t possible to build one. [00:00] Nicolas: Okay, Gabriele. So, like all great architecture, the mother of all the arts, an architect would argue, the Hall of the Nine in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico has really thrown us on a wild goose chase that has been extremely productive. And somehow the hunch of this reference we’ve known for a long time, of Lorenzetti’s frescoes in that room, has, I guess, prompted a whole concretization of theory that has been long coming, right? And this week, I think maybe one of the things that’s important: I mean, we both heard that podcast that you shared by James Hankins, the author of Virtue Politics and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. He’s really excited about his discovery of Francesco Patrizi, the unsung hero of Italian early modern political theory. But I’ve been reading Thomas More’s Utopia, and you’ve been reading Commanding Heights, right? The recent... I’m blanking on the authors. Little recent publication by? [01:40] Gabriele: Yeah, it’s the new hottest PDF on X, by Will Manidis. [01:45] Nicolas: By Will Manidis, yeah. And I think somehow we need to square off those three things. Maybe I’ll walk you through a little bit of my thoughts on Utopia, but it just seems like there is this genre in the early modern period in which the state is the size of a territory, right? There’s many city-states or small states, and all the questions about, in this moment of great... there’s lots of violence and corruption, and there’s a lot of change going about. There’s a lot of questions of how to build great political projects, how to educate princes into becoming great statesmen, and with a, I think, medieval idealism, but also maybe modern Machiavellian pragmatism, right? And reading Utopia has been really interesting in that sense, in that first and foremost, Utopia is this satirical story about an island in which people live and govern themselves in this very peculiar way. It’s an ideal society that is described in the book. And it’s written actually not far from when Machiavelli’s writing The Prince, right? And also, so I think with New Atlantis, which we already discussed, I felt like I had to read Utopia, because after New Atlantis, Utopia felt like that definitive source. And now I’m realizing it’s not, but there’s more and more. So maybe let me just go through the story real quick, right? There’s this traveler that More encounters, I think somewhere in Holland, and he tells them about having been to the Americas and having lost himself along the way to go to this place called Utopia, where he lived for five years. And the book is divided into two parts. The first part, in which this Raphael guy... they’re at dinner and they’re talking about how he looks so wise and whatnot, and people are encouraging him to be at the service of princes, and he’s debating whether there’s any use in philosophers serving princes, right? Since princes basically have all the opposite instincts of what a philosopher thinks they should have. And then basically this Raphael guy tells the story of Utopia. And then it ends. It’s a wild story, but it ends with More saying, wow, that was a great story. I’m not sure I agree with the whole thing, but it’s too late to engage Raphael. Dinner’s over, let’s just go home, right? And so it ends with revealing, I think, a satirical quality. But it’s a very interesting utopian or idealistic description of a territory and of a polity, the dimension of a territory, because it’s different from New Atlantis, right? New Atlantis is the story of a class that somehow is at the service of this polity in this island lost somewhere in the ocean. Whereas Utopia, I think it’s more like a description of a monastic republic, right? Where it’s not that there’s a ruling class that has all these peculiar behaviors and to which average people can ascend and voluntarily join that class somehow and acquire the behaviors and the privileges of it. It’s actually a society where everyone is described... there is hierarchy, but everyone is somehow described as having behaviors that are in a way as radical as those of maybe what you could say of this academic class of New Atlantis, right? And so more than maybe an ideal polity, it’s actually like a description of a monastic republic, like Mount Athos, right? Only that More doesn’t... the family is the basic unit of this society, right? People don’t even vote individually, they actually operate as family units, right? And so there’s no property rights. There’s no money, basically. And all of these people live in these little small communities of about 6,000 families along this moon-shaped island, and they all share resources and they all work six hours a day instead of however many. And everyone is super rigorous and everyone dresses the same except the priests, and everyone’s super somehow pious and bound to the land. And there’s some interesting mechanisms, like people rotate between the city and the country to maintain a cohesion between rural people and urban people, which I thought was kind of cool. But I think for me, I mean, More’s comment at the end, which emphasizes the satirical element of the genre, maybe was a cure [unclear], but reading through the whole thing, it just feels somehow absurd, right? In the sense that whilst you have family as a unit, it feels like maybe the closest real thing to Utopia that I’ve seen really is Shakerism, right? Where people do live without money, without private property, within this system. But they don’t have children, and it’s voluntary; most people entered voluntarily, right? And so you can have a rank within the society, but you can’t control any real... none of the resources are ever yours. All you can aspire to is rank, to govern the resources of the whole community. But with that, whilst you keep thinking of it as something where there is a family unit, none of it works, right? Because there isn’t the nesting of interests that makes up a real society. The civic, civil component of a society somehow just can’t be really managed, right, without property or without money. And that’s something that I think, well, in New Atlantis again there’s a distinction, but I think in the other maybe book that of course I was thinking of while reading these things, which is Plato’s Republic. That is another picture of an entire polity the size of a city-state that’s very similar to this. It’s not satirical, I would say. But yet again, there’s the whole question... I think Plato’s more implicitly engaging the fact that there are nested interests within society. And so he says, okay, we take the elite and we have them basically sever the relationship of parent-child, and then we educate them in this very specific way. And then they govern as these philosopher kings, right? But then everyone else is just a normal person. And I think, for me, I mean, there’s many, many takeaways, and there’s some very interesting things about incentive designs, population control, all sorts of things. But I think in relation to a lot of our topics, what I thought was fascinating is that this is a satire, but it was remarkably close to, I think, what many of the people that do things like territorial regeneration today are after, right? Where they’re after this image of a place and restoring it, recreating it, reinventing it, or whatever it is. And then they’re not designing for incentives, which is our whole thing of protocolization. It’… 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

  2. Oct 28

    Is San Marino Still a Live Player?

    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 … 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

    Is San Marino Still a Live Player?

  3. Aug 7

    Who Should Get Credit?

    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… 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

  4. Aug 3

    What Can We Learn from Lorenzetti?

    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 thin… 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

  5. Jul 25

    How Do You Teach Territorial Statecraft?

    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 p… 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

  6. Jul 16

    What Was Architecture?

    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

    What Was Architecture?

  7. Jul 16

    What Comes After the Toolkit?

    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

  8. 09/30/2025

    Shape Rural Futures: Reclaiming Institutional Capacity

    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 discip… 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

  • 8 Episodes

About

liminal is an applied research organization building territorial statecraft capacity in fragile territories liminalfutures.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Liminal
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    8
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Liminal
  • Show Website
    Liminal Dialogues