Six questions we keep returning to.

Representation alone no longer carries the weight we place on it. Citizens' assemblies, sortition and deliberative panels have shown that ordinary people, given time, evidence and good facilitation, reach thoughtful positions on questions that paralyse parliaments. Agora exists to make that practice ordinary rather than exceptional — a room, a programme and a public record that anyone can walk into.

What decision in your town would be better made by an assembly of its residents?

Most of our institutions were designed for a century of expansion and cheap energy. Changing them is less about single policies than about the incentives, measures and stories underneath them. Agora convenes the people already working at those leverage points — researchers, organisers, public servants, artists — so that the diagnosis is shared before the solutions are argued.

Which measure or incentive, if it changed, would move everything else around it?

How we build determines how we live together: whether we meet our neighbours, whether we can afford to stay, whether a street is a place or merely a route. Agora treats architecture as civic argument — courtyards, thresholds, shade, water and shared ground are political material as much as aesthetic choices.

What would your street need in order for strangers to linger there?

An olive tree can live two thousand years and still bear fruit; it asks for patience rather than acceleration. Agora hosts the difficult conversation about sufficiency — what a good life needs, what it does not, and how economies organised around less can still be generous, employed and fair.

What in your life would you happily have less of, if others did too?

Deliberation is a skill: listening for the strongest version of an argument, changing your mind in public, sitting with complexity. Agora runs open sessions, screenings and reading rooms with schools, libraries and universities so that civic literacy is practised long before a crisis demands it.

What should every school teach about disagreeing well?

Film, music, books and artworks carry ideas across borders faster than policy ever will. Agora's museum and programme place international work beside the questions it speaks to, so culture is not decoration around civic life but the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Which film, book or piece of music changed how you see a public question?