Last week many countries gradually eased up the lockdown. It is, therefore, important to remind the political class that citizen participation in the reconstruction of society in the post-emergency period is fundamental. In France, a panel of 150 citizens randomly selected to be part of the “Citizen's Climate Convention” presented the Report “Contribution to the crisis exit plan”, while a hundred mayors, governors, intellectuals and social leaders sent to President Macron the petition “#NousLesPremiers: a democratic scenario for the world after”, which proposes a 3-stage plan, that would entail the direct involvement of people in the reconstruction of society and the economy. In Spain, the debate opened on how to follow the (controversial) proposal for a new “Moncloa Pact”, providing for the creation of panels of randomly selected citizens so that they can share their views on the planning of the “post-Covid era”.

As wrote the former president of the Italian Constitutional Court and founder of the Turin Biennial of Democracy, Zagrebelski, the government does not seem to understand that “people's habits, activities and material and spiritual needs are not inert matter, mouldable like wax in the least details” and that “after the period of obedience it is necessary to build the phase of responsibility”. Such cannot do without active citizen participation because "calling for obedience and asking for ethical responsibility are profoundly different things" and the means to promote each of them are also totally different. This debate was reinforced with the presentation of the "2019 Report of shared administration of common goods”, written by the Subsidiarity Laboratory (www.labsus.org), which coordinates 218 Italian cities that invested in the construction of pacts for the management of spaces, buildings and public activities, co-constructing municipal regulations to speed up cooperation between communities and municipalities. It is worth stressing that about 20 percent of these pacts are carried out with informal groups of citizens (not legally constituted), and 1/5 of the participants are individuals not affiliated in the forms of classic associations. A significant part of these ‘movements’ did not interrupt their activity during the emergency period, choosing to direct their action to support vulnerable people. To highlight the contribution to the resilience of Italian cities, offered by these participatory experiences, the National Association of Municipalities (ANCI) has been organising webinars to disseminate good practices and to imagine how to “re-frame civic participation” with the gradual resumption of social activities. Cities like Milan, Bari or Naples have been opening their Resilience Plans to citizens, organising hubs to optimize spontaneous solidarity activities, and coordinating the more than 40,000 crowdfunding initiatives that were being financed during the emergency period. Many municipalities have been distributing extensive surveys to understand how citizens have experienced limited sociability, home spaces, the required family support for TeleSchool and the dynamics of smart working. In just one week, Reggio Emilia collected 4,800 responses to an extensive questionnaire to rethink civic participation, and 34 percent of those who responded said they were ready to get involved, although they had never been involved in participatory processes before the crisis.

Obviously, participation will have to be rethought. People are afraid to be reunited in large groups, and are probably fed up with technology in their lives, but above all, they want to be heard on major issues, such as the reconstruction of the social state (particularly education and health) and the struggle against new inequalities and exclusions.

It is also necessary to rethink housing standards, to reprogramme them for new forms of living and multifunctionalities, as taught by a network of architects from Galicia that is supporting residents in the transformation of their living spaces. New Orleans - after Hurricane Katrina - has taught the world that participation in reconstruction is indispensable for rethinking the urban fabric and its economy. During the Covid-19 crisis, municipalities such as those in Prato (with their early dialogue with the vast Chinese community) or Seattle (deciding with citizens on the sites to be used for quarantines) have proven that investing on residents can bring brilliant solutions even in the emergency.

Can Portugal stay out of this debate? It is impossible for a country that has entered the world map of public participation with force, to which the national media has dedicated so much space. We are one of the few countries that has had hundreds of local participatory budgets and even three experiences promoted by the national government, and the RAP (Network of Participatory Autarchies) is unique in the European panorama. For two months, our formalized participatory processes were on stand-by mode, blocked by social distance and sanitary emergencies. But it is now time to distribute, share the reconstruction, channel the new forms of solidarity and playful activism that were born in the emergency, and to transform them into strategic activism. To rethink the new economy, harmony with nature, ways of making culture and meeting in ways that guarantee security and create new sociability. For the “new world” to be really new, the State cannot act alone. Institutions are inertial and political elites do not have enough creativity to put themselves in the place of the many different people who make up our society. In order not to repeat the mistakes of the past, we do not need assistentialism or paternalism, but that citizens be recognised the right to participate, which was gain, during these months of collective tragedy, with responsible and proactive behaviours. The State is above all responsible for setting up a tripartite reconstruction process (institutions, companies, communities), opening substantive spaces for citizens, and coordinating the levels of governments in a multilevel participatory path, which can immediately take advantage (at each administrative level) of so many ideas and co-management practices for common goods that have emerged in these months and - certainly - will emerge along the way.