On 27 August 2026, I presented The Acoustics of Belonging at the UNESCO Creative Cities Forum in Varaždin, Croatia. The talk took place outdoors in Vatroslav Jagić Park and moved between architecture, democracy, music, public space, cohousing and a question I increasingly find more useful than “participation”:

Who is allowed to begin?

The argument started somewhere less respectable: playing bagpipes on the streets of Frankfurt.

The regulations I encountered at the time were largely concerned with amplified street music. Bagpipes presented an awkward problem. They are extremely loud, completely portable and require no electricity whatsoever.

The city had rules. I had bagpipes.

For a moment there was a gap between the regulation and the thing standing in front of it. Something had happened that the instruction manual had not anticipated.

Life had arrived before the instruction manual.

That small encounter points towards a much larger architectural question. How complete should we allow our rules, buildings and cities to become?

Architecture is not simply a background against which politics happens. A door permits something. A wall prevents something. A bench says stay. Remove it and the sentence changes. A square can become an assembly; add enough barriers and it becomes a queue.

The political character of architecture often appears precisely in these apparently innocent decisions.

This is also why I have become suspicious of the word inclusive.

A shopping centre can welcome people of every nationality and background. But try moving its furniture, sleeping there for six hours, holding an unscheduled political meeting, cooking, planting something or playing music.

Suddenly inclusion acquires a security guard.

You discover that you are free to choose among activities somebody else already chose for you.

There is therefore an important distinction:

Access means I may enter. Agency means my presence has some capacity to change what happens once I am there.

But even agency does not completely explain belonging.

A hotel accommodates me. An airport may accommodate me very efficiently. A shopping centre may welcome me enthusiastically, particularly if I have a credit card.

None of those things means that I belong there.

Belonging begins when a place carries some of my memory, when it expects my return, when I can leave a trace without owning the whole thing.

So I proposed another distinction:

Belonging is not hospitality. Belonging is shared authorship.

This is where participation becomes problematic.

Participation is not automatically democratic. We can invite people to workshops, consultations, cultural programmes and events while leaving the underlying arrangement untouched.

Hence one of the central propositions of the talk:

Participation without authorship is choreography.

The democratic question is whether you are allowed to change the score.

The same argument enters housing and adaptive reuse.

Putting people under the same roof does not create community. Living together is not the same thing as governing together. Community becomes interesting when residents acquire some responsibility, power and authorship over the world they share.

During the talk I used one of our projects in Finland, an old railway station, to make a related point about reuse. A ticket window may become obsolete. The need for strangers to encounter one another does not.

A building designed around departure can acquire reasons for people to remain: to live, meet, work and make music. The building survives because another generation refuses to accept the original architect’s intention as its final meaning.

That is not merely adaptive reuse. It is a democratic principle.

The argument eventually leads beyond access, participation and even agency.

Who may enter?

Who may participate?

Who has agency?

And then:

Who is allowed to begin?

Who may make the first sound? Who may start the gathering? Who may change the meaning of a place for an afternoon? Who may introduce something that the architect, planner, council, curator — even UNESCO — did not predict?

A citizen who may only participate in things initiated by others risks becoming an extremely active spectator.

A democratic city therefore needs incompleteness.

A chair moves. Somebody paints something the architect hates. An old building acquires a use nobody predicted. A musician begins. A neighbour complains. They negotiate. Neither disappears.

Perhaps a planner even discovers people using a square incorrectly and has the courage not to correct them immediately.

The point is not to abolish planning. The architect still designs, the planner still plans, law remains and institutions remain.

But they stop pretending that good government consists of predicting every worthwhile use before it happens.

They create enough structure for strangers to share a world and enough incompleteness for those strangers to alter it.

And that leads to the final proposition:

A democratic city has no final note.

It has only the next person who is still allowed to begin.

The Acoustics of Belonging | Pedro Aibéo — UNESCO Varaždin 2026