Autumn of 2018 set France on fire. The literal street fires didn’t last long, but the political fires of the Yellow Vest Protests rampaged for months and years. Objecting specifically to rising gas costs and more broadly to an economy they saw as unfair and a government they saw as out of touch, protestors took to the streets donning the reflective yellow vests French motorists are required to keep in their cars. Among many responses seeking desperately to quell the furor, the government convened in 2019 a Citizens Convention for Climate, an assembly of 150 French citizens chosen by lottery. Meeting in seven weekend sessions, the convention produced 149 proposals.

Was the convention a success? If measured in legislative impact, not really. In an unofficial eighth session, the participants returned to grade legislators’ work in implementing their proposals. The citizens gave parliament an “F.”

But the citizens did their job beautifully. Preeminent Yale democracy scholar Hélène Landemore has written effusively about the conventioneers’ efforts, most recently in this year’s Politics Without Politicians. She graded them highly in competency, efficiency, professionalism, and productivity, of course (I’m lucky to get 149 articles of laundry done in 8 weekends). But beyond that, she reports humility, earnestness, listening (even to the softest voices), and an all-too-unfamiliar emotion she terms civic love.

All of this, remember, when the country was on figurative fire. In fact, this too-hot-for-conventional-politics scenario has become a common thread among citizens’ assemblies. When an Irish assembly tackled abortion – successfully coming to broad consensus around constitutional amendments, no less – it was broadly understood that they did so because no assembly comprised solely of politicians could. The 2004 Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia that helped start the deliberative wave was called because obviously you can’t trust elected officials to decide how to elect officials.

We supporters of democracy in America should take heed when seeking opportunities in US politics to convene civic assemblies (or rabbles as I like to call them). Even though America as a whole is a relative rabble noob, we shouldn’t start with the easy stuff. Instead, we go straight for the biggest pickles. If there’s a problem that politicians know they really need to solve but can't for whatever reason – too hot, too partisan, too controversial, too complicated, too risky, too expensive – it’s time to send in the citizens.

One such problem in New York City sticks out. In fact, it sticks right out of the high bluffs that give the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood its name. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (better known as the B.Q.E.) is part of I-278, the only road that traverses all five boroughs. Its winding path testifies to the strength of Brooklyn residents’ fortitude 70-odd years ago in the face of plans to bull-doze right through the middle of down. The ingenious compromise produced three enormous shelves of traffic spanning Brooklyn Heights: west(ish)-bound on the bottom, east(ish)-bound in the middle, and foot on top.

The problem? It’s well past its prime. As detailed in an impressive New York Times piece on the BQE last November:

The cantilever, which opened in 1954, was designed to be used for 50 years. The risks only go up as it continues to deteriorate year after year, even as its life span has been extended with interim measures.

A long expired due date. Big risks. Major complexity. Huge expense: as much as $5 billion. And a daunting track record. Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to fix the B.Q.E. So did Mayor Eric Adams, but…

Both struggled to build any consensus at all as local residents countered with their own ideas. The endless back and forth led to more delays and inertia.

The story of the B.Q.E. is not one of partisan gridlock in the city council; there aren’t enough Republicans on the council to lock the Democrats’ grid. Nor is it one of ignoring citizen input. If anything, it’s a story of citizen gridlock.

The standoff over the B.Q.E. has become, more broadly, a symbol of the power that local communities wield over critical infrastructure projects around the nation.

There is a lot to love about the New Yorkers’ asphalt ardor. It’s not just about protesting noise or high costs or short-term inconvenience. Many, for example, cherish the literal top-shelf pedestrian experience of the promenade. And they want to love whatever comes next as much or more.

This community pushback is often characterized as NIMBYism — the “not in my backyard” impediment to change — but the reality is more nuanced. Many Brooklyn residents say they are not against improving the B.Q.E., and, in fact, are fighting for a better future with less traffic and more space for people.

If you’re picturing sporadic protest signs and graffiti, you’re underestimating these folks.

Though community opposition is hardly new, it is thriving today as residents have become more nimble and sophisticated at influencing projects, or halting them entirely. They strategize about just who to target with their ads and protests, assemble technical experts and consultants to argue on their behalf, and extend their reach with email blasts, online petitions and social media.

So the decaying B.Q.E. is mired not in backroom political squabbles or jurisdiction fights but in a chaotic open public debate between a slew of competing ideas. The Times piece details three waves of proposals: lovely graphics, fascinating social dynamics… well worth the read. But here we need to emphasize not the plans themselves but just how badly this conversation needs to shift from protest and debate to productive deliberation.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and urbanist, said that many of the visions for the B.Q.E. did not fully consider engineering and cost constraints. “Communities get enamoured with ideas that aren’t viable, and then they start thinking worse of the ideas that are viable,” he said.

Engineering and cost constraints. These are the kinds of things that citizens are terrible at tackling with their voter hats on but wonderful at addressing when wearing deliberator hats. They slow down, they assess, they digest, and they reason.

New York needs a civic assembly to take all the wonderful civic energy around the B.Q.E and turn it into something actionable. Recommendations from a genuinely representative assembly of ordinary citizens come with a level of democratic legitimacy that electoral bodies can never muster. It’s the best approximation of what we would get if all of New York took time to study the options, weigh the impacts, and decide together.

In January, the newly minted New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani launched the Office of Mass Engagement, declaring the new office will create “a deeper connection between City Hall and community organizations, faith-based groups, and everyday New Yorkers looking to make their voices heard.” Tascha Van Auken, who led the remarkable campaign that brought Mamdani into office, now heads the office.

Mass engagement is exciting, and certainly valuable to campaigns, but the B.Q.E. provides a great example of where engagement alone could cause more problems than solutions. Or, rather, a glut of solutions that deepens the problem. To solve problems like the one the decaying Brooklyn roadway poses we need not just mass engagement but a form of deep engagement that can yield coherence. Without that, citizens will continue to trumpet their favored plans from the water towers. On this issue citizens are very much engaged, but not in a way that leaves politicians well positioned to serve them. Even if elected leaders dutifully listen to everyone involved and make wise decisions together, they will still find it impossible to avoid angering passionate voters, because the voters aren’t necessarily hearing each other.

But the city really can’t not decide what to do. Not deciding means kicking the can down a crumbling old concrete road literally hanging over New Yorkers’ heads.

So they need a civic assembly. They should bring lot-selected citizens together to hear from experts and from each other and come together around a solution. What would such a rabble recommend for the B.Q.E.? No idea. But a well-established pattern suggests participants would be extremely thoughtful, would engage seriously with the trade-offs, would consult closely and respectfully with experts, and would reach solutions endorsed by a large supermajority of participants. And they would produce clear documentation of their work and their rationale for everyone to see.

And we can even predict that, through this process, these assembled New Yorkers would not only help the city solve an intractable problem that has buggered mayors for years; they would experience a version of the emotional experience Landemore describes so compellingly: civic love.

I sincerely hope Van Auken and the new Office of Mass Engagement will institutionalize civic assemblies in New York City. And that anyone positioned to encourage her to do so will seize the opportunity.

There are three key lessons New York should learn from civic assemblies to date. The first is that the government must take citizens’ work seriously; otherwise participants will feel their time has been wasted. In the short term this means city officials must commit to engaging with the process at appropriate intervals and to voting on all formal assembly proposals. And, by further commitment, if any proposals are rejected, the city must communicate their rationale and allow the assembly to submit revisions.

The second lesson is that citizens’ assemblies are more effective when implemented as part of a broader assembly system. A major pioneer in this space is the Ostbelgien Model, so-called due to its deployment in German-speaking East Belgium. The model entails one permanent agenda-setting assembly (with rotating members) that chooses topics for temporary assemblies each year. Over the medium-to-long term, assembly systems are far more cost-effective than one-off rabbles. And the fact that citizens set the agenda adds considerable legitimacy, countering the idea that there is someone behind the curtain pulling strings.

Paris, France illustrates both of these first two points. The city now boasts a permanent council inspired by this model (and by the success of the climate convention mentioned above). And the city council is committed to reviewing their proposals. They built a system, and the government takes it seriously. In 2024, working within this framework, 100 Parisians wrote a Citizens Bill that legislators passed directly into law.

Finally, civic assembly advocates insist that process designs should be adapted to local strengths and needs. There could be many ideas about what this means for New York, but one is this: the city in general, and this administration in particular, is very good at mass engagement. The design should embrace that strength.

How? The Ostbelgien Model was largely inspired by the work of Vermont’s own Terry Bouricius, whose “multi-body sortition” designs translated lottery-based democratic patterns from ancient Athens into a contemporary context. But it’s a partial implementation; the Ostbelgien Model has two kinds of assemblies; Bouricius’ model has six. One of those six assembly types, which Bouricius calls Interest Panels, could be of great interest to New York. Unlike civic assemblies, Interest Panels can be joined by anyone who is, well…, interested; if you keep getting more volunteers, you keep forming more panels. In other words, they support mass engagement. Proposals produced by the Interest Panels are channeled to the lot-selected civic assemblies. The notion is that good ideas can come from anywhere, but only ideas approved by a genuinely representative body (as in, one selected from the population by lots) can be considered democratic.

If New York built a civic assembly system that included interest panels, they could not merely wield their strengths in citizen engagement, they could leap to the front of a global movement for democratic renewal.

New Yorkers love their city. They care deeply about it. They romanticize it, personify it, gripe about it, stand in awe of it… It’s a bit much, frankly, to those of us who are new to town. It’s also a resource. Civic assemblies could help harness New Yorkers’ passion for their home city; they could help cohere the passion. They could help turn city love into civic love.

And they could fix the f’ing road.

(HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK)!

(All love, NYC.)