I visited Mr. Nusseibeh at the East Jerusalem Electric Light Company, one of the few municipal businesses the Israelis allowed Palestinians to manage. He was a courtly man who, in a better world, would have devoted himself not to electricity but to poetry. We had slipped into speaking French. He described to me writers and artists he’d known in Paris in the 1930s; these figures were in some ways more vivid to him than the immediate difficulties he faced.

I cannot claim that a bond of trust developed between us, since I could do nothing about being American and a good Jew. But as the afternoon light faded in his office and we spoke in a language foreign to the Israeli monitors, we began to understand one another. Our conversation, mostly about prewar Paris, continued over the next few days in a café and finally in Mr. Nusseibeh’s home. France had been, for different reasons, a refuge for each of us, and there seems to be something about Paris that arouses in foreigners sentiments of regret. In any event, this bond emboldened Mr. Nusseibeh, the most courteous of men, to challenge me about the present political dilemma.

“You want to build a place at Damascus Gate for ‘democracy,’” Mr. Nusseibeh said, [I paraphrase], “but you cannot show me—even supposing democracy is possible between victors and their captives—what a ‘democratic space’ looks like. Will better buildings incline the Israeli people to treat us as equals? Will better buildings diminish the rage of our own young? Even if we overlook our painful present circumstances, what effect can the mere shape of a wall, the curve of a street, and the presence of lights and plants have in weakening the grip of power or shaping the desire for justice?”

Mr. Nusseibeh took the occasion of the ensuing silence to pour more tea. His challenges were philosophical but the context of our discussion was no philosophy seminar. The need for democratic spaces in a city challenges urban designers today in places as diverse as Sarejevo, Berlin, and Los Angeles, yet it is difficult to imagine how architecture could meet this need. One key to democracy is displacing violent conflict to peaceable, deliberative realms. How to do so was Mr. Nusseibeh’s challenge to me.

In ancient times Jerusalem’s citizens might have responded to Mr. Nusseibeh’s challenge by invoking Athens, the center of Western civilization in the classical era. From roughly 600 to 350 B.C., Athens located its democratic practices in the town square and the theater. In these spaces, very different kinds of democracy were practiced. The square stimulated citizens to move beyond their personal concerns and acknowledge the presence and needs of other citizens. The theater helped citizens focus their attention and concentrate on decision making. We would never want to copy the social conditions of Athenian democracy (the majority of people were slaves; women were excluded from politics), but we can learn something by studying how these often volatile, intensely competitive people connected their democracy to architecture.

In the Pnyx Athenians debated and decided on the city’s actions. The Pnyx was a bowl-shaped, open-air theater, a ten-minute walk from the city’s central square. Chiseled out of a hill, the Pnyx resembled other Greek theaters, and, like them, was used originally for dancing and plays. In the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., however, Athenians, seeking order in their politics, put this ordinary theater to a different use. Speakers stood in the open round space on a stone platform, called a bema, so that they could be seen by everyone. Behind the speaker the land dropped away, so that words seemed to hover in the air between the crowd of normally five to six thousand men and the empty sky; from morning to late afternoon, sunlight struck the speaker’s face, so that nothing in his expression or gestures was obscured by shadow. The audience for this political theater, men who belonged to the same local tribe, sat around the bowl in assigned places. Sitting in a semi-circle, citizens could see each other’s reactions even as they watched the orator at the bema.

The men sat or stood this way for a long time—as long as the sunlight lasted. The theatrical space thus functioned as a detection mechanism—its focus and duration allowed participants to get beneath the surface of momentary impressions. This disciplinary space of eye, voice, and body had one great virtue: through concentration of attention on a speaker and identification of others in the audience who might call out challenges or comments, the ancient political theater sought to hold citizens responsible for their words.

In the Pnyx, two visual rules organized the often raucous meetings at which people made decisions: exposure—of the speaker and of the audience to one another—and fixity of place, where the speaker stood and the audience sat. These two visual rules supported a verbal order: the unfolding of an argument.

The other space of democracy was the town square, the Athenian agora. The square consisted of a large open space crossed diagonally by the main street of Athens; at the sides of the agora were temples and buildings called stoas, sheds that opened sideways onto the agora. Many activities occurred simultaneously in the agora—commerce, religious rituals, simple hanging out. The agora also contained a rectangular law court, surrounded by a low wall, so that citizens who were banking or making an offering to the gods for instance, could also follow the progress of justice. The stoa helped calm this diverse hubbub; as one moved out of the open space into a building, one moved into more private spaces. The rooms at the back of the stoas were used for dinner parties and private meetings. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the stoa was the transition space just under the shelter of the roof on the open side; here one could retreat yet keep in touch with the square.

What import did the complex, teeming space of the agora have for the practice of democracy? A democracy supposes that people can openly entertain views other than their own. This was Aristotle’s contention in the Politics. He thought the awareness of difference occurs primarily in cities, since every city is formed by synoikismos, a drawing together of different families and tribes, of competing economic interests, and of natives with foreigners.

Two millennia later, “difference” seems to be largely about identity—about race, gender, or class. Aristotle’s definition of difference was more complicated. He also included the experience of doing disparate, even incongruous things—such as praying and banking—in the same space. The mixture in a city of action as well as identity is the foundation of its distinctive politics. Aristotle’s hope was that, becoming accustomed to a diverse, complex milieu, citizens would be less likely to react violently when challenged by something strange or contrary. Instead, this diverse environment should encourage and support the discussion of differing views or conflicting interests. The agora was the place in the city for this tolerance of difference.

Yet if in the same space different persons or activities are merely concentrated but remain isolated and segregated, diversity loses its force. To count, differences must interact.

The Athenian agora made diverse male citizens interact in two ways. First, the open space of the agora contained few visual barriers between events occurring at the same time; Athenians did not experience physical compartmentalization. Thus, coming to the town square to negotiate with a banker, one might observe a trial in the law court and even shout out one’s opinion about the proceedings. Second, the agora established a space for stepping back from such engagement—the edge, just under the roof of the stoa; here was a fluid, liminal zone between private and public.

These two principles of visual design—lack of visual barriers and a well-defined transitional zone between public and private—shaped people’s experience of communication. The flow of speech was less continuous and singular than in the Pnyx; in the agora, verbal communication was more fragmentary, as people moved from one scene to another. The operations of the eye were correspondingly more active and varied in the agora than in the Pnyx; a person standing under the stoa roof looked out, scanning. In the Pnyx, the eye was mostly focused on the orator at the bema.

This ancient city illustrates how politics can shaped by urban design. The theater and the square are the two best designs for democracy???. The theater organizes the sustained attention required for group decision making; the square is a school for the often fragmentary, confusing experience of diversity. The square prepares people for debate; the theater disciplines their debating.

Of course, the designs do not dictate politics; we need only think of the Nazi spectacles in Germany to summon an image of theatrically focused attention dedicated to totalitarian ends; the disorders of 19th-century Parisian squares frequently drove people further inside themselves rather than making them more attentive to each other. Yet here at least was an answer to Mr. Nusseibeh’s questions: what does democracy look like?

At the time I went to Jerusalem, my concern was the agora, and this urban form was the touchstone of my faith in urban democracy—as it was for other urbanists like Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre, and more largely, for radicals of the 1960s. I knew one big thing when I began to write: every individual needs to be challenged by others in order to grow psychologically as well as practice democracy. Psychologically, human beings develop only in a rhythm of disorientation and recovery; a static sense of self and world leads to a kind of psychological death. Such painful and uncomfortable encounters with those who differ are the only ways in which individuals learn to tolerate the flux of democratic debate. They can lean to live in difference in an agora.

I could have summoned these arguments when Mr. Nusseibeh challenged me about plans for the Damascus Gate; I had reasoned them through in my first book, The Uses of Disorder, and spent a decade thereafter trying to realize them in practice. But I was silent, for two reasons: I would have answered in bad faith—as an American urbanist speaking about democracy—and, in Jerusalem, I was losing my faith in the agora.

A future historian may well conclude that United States in the last half of the twentieth century focused its energies on creating a built environment that discouraged democracy. Gated communities, now the most popular form of American residential development, are an extreme expression of this fear of the agora—homogeneous communities guarded and sealed off like medieval fiefdoms. In my youth, some land development already tended toward the same end. The shopping malls of the 1920s to 1950s were diverse places, but the malls constructed in the 1960s were monofunctional. Today you will rarely see in a mall, next door to the GAP, an AIDS service agency, a police station, or a school. Moreover, the renewal of old cities like my own, New York, has depended on the globalization of the world economy. Globalization creates sharply stratified cities; a globalized core now isolates Manhattan, for instance, from the localized economies and cultures of the other boroughs.

The profession of urban design shares this aura of bad faith. The pristine small towns inspired by New Urbanism are worlds apart from the everyday disorders of life; these kitschy, pseudo-communities that advertise themselves as antidotes to suburban sprawl provide little home for differences—differences of the kind that lead to conflicts of ethnicity, race, class, or sexual preference.

To be sure, the American city has only reflected larger currents of American culture. American culture does put a premium on difference, in the identity-talk that emphasizes distinctions, but such identity-talk usually leads to isolation rather than interaction. Our culture prefers clear pictures of self and social context. You could object that all cultures share this preference, but few has relentlessly put clarity of identity in the service of social and geographic isolation. For the sake of this clarity, for the sake of identity, democracy can be sacrificed—democracy in Aristotle’s sense of the dialogues, debates, and shared deliberations that might take us out of ourselves and the sphere of our immediate self-knowledge and interest.

In 1980, when I went to Jerusalem, these American rejections of the agora partly accounted for my silence when I was challenged by Mr. Nusseibeh; I felt that I’d come to him in bad faith.

Yet going to Jerusalem was important for me as an urbanist. The city challenged my belief in the agora, at least as a self-sufficing model of democracy. Jerusalem’s Old City is filled with the human differences that thousands of years of conquest, migration, faith, and trade have put on the land like a thick impasto on canvas. In its covered shopping streets, Jews and Muslim shopkeepers mix together in pursuit of trade and tourists. On the Via Dolorosa, processions of Christian pilgrims stream past the small shops of non-believers who acknowledge the Christians’ faith by leaving them alone. When the right-wing Israeli government sought to dig beneath the Islamic shrine of al-Aksa, many Jewish citizens turned out in protest. All these are signs of the living presence of the agora. Still, Jerusalem is hardly democratic. The spirit of the agora permeated Sarejevo before the civil war; and in a more moderate fashion it exists in post-communist Berlin. All these places have known daily and painful encounters with difference, yet such encounters have not strengthened civic bonds. If these cities have various modern versions of the agora, they lack any effective equivalent of a Pnyx.

I don’t mean to suggest that I suddenly stopped believing in the value of living with difference, but that psychological virtue requires something more if it is to be realized as politics. However, for my ’60s generation, an ordered, focused space like the Pnyx was thought anti-democratic precisely because it was disciplinary. Foucault’s surgical dissections of disciplinary power frightened us. Moreover, we were ambivalent about linking politics and theater. There was a lot of political street-theater in my generation, particularly in protests against the Vietnam War. But then, as now, political theater also summoned up images of “spin control,” the manipulation of public sentiment through clever role-playing, inflamed rhetoric, and artificial scenarios of doom or glory.

These political games may be perennial; they certainly took place in the Athenian Pnyx, despite its architectural rigor. But the need for a modern Pnyx derives from the peculiar conditions of modern communication. Such vices as spin control are unfortunately abetted by technological progress. The easy editing of televised imagery, particularly digital images, strengthens the politician’s capacity to “spin,” to conceal rather than stand revealed. Unlike those in the ancient Pnyx, those watching television’s glowing box cannot see each other. It’s sometimes said that the Internet might be a new space of democracy. But screen communications emphasize denotative statements and short messages; to exit from painful confrontation, you need only click a mouse. Easy, quick decisions are encouraged by such conditions, not the difficult sorting out that requires time and commitment.

The urgent necessity for democratic deliberation today is that people concentrate upon, rather than “surf” over, social reality. To pay attention and to commit means our culture needs in a broad way to revise its fear of discipline. For this reason I’ve come to believe that designers need to pay attention to the disciplinary architecture of theaters as possible political spaces. All live performance aims at concentrating attention. To achieve sustained attention, to commit people to one another even when the going gets rough or becomes boring, to unpack the meaning of arguments—all these require a space that focuses the eye and the voice.

I’d like to illustrate the possibility of creating a modern Pnyx by siting some innovative theater architecture created in the last half century, work that addresses how to make theaters appropriate for our cities. Although contemporary in form, these buildings are imbued with the ancient idea that the theater can be used as a space of political concentration.

One of the most innovative is the theater recently created in Tokyo by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. It is a multi-use space, and Ando’s emphasis is on how to make speech from the audience as clear as speech from the central stage. Like an ancient Greek theater, this theater uses as much natural light as possible, based on the architect’s belief that people can remain comfortable longer in a space in such light. Although Ando’s theater is meant, of course, for plays, its other programmed uses include political meetings, and this political program relates to its most unusual feature: it can be taken down and re-erected in different parts of the city. Aldo Rossi imagined a similarly portable theatre for use in Italian cities. Portability has an important political dimension, since it equalizes the conditions of discourse: meetings throughout the city can be organized under common physical conditions.

When we think about the use of theaters used as meeting spaces, the integration of the theatrical space into the urban fabric becomes important. In London’s Islington, a theater has been recently constructed that attempts this integration both in its citing and in the articulation of its walls. In the Half-Moon Theatre, every window looks and functions like a door. For both plays and community meetings, people walking outside have only to look in to see what’s happening—as was true with the law courts in the ancient agora.

For Americans, such performance spaces may seem alien, because they draw in dense (and thus frightening) crowds casually. The suburban condition is one of dispersion; the shopping mall and the big-box store, which aim at keeping customers moving rather than sitting and talking, are like crowd-islands. In one of his most remarkable late projects, Louis Kahn addressed this problem head on. He sought to make, within an isolated building, a theater in which something like a city is contained. The inner spaces surrounding the auditorium shell are articulated like the streets of an Italian hill town; the program for this theater imagines these spaces being open to the public at all times, even when no events are in progress. By creating an inner agora, as it were, the program envisions that the theater itself would become a familiar and natural place in which to hold meetings, large ones inside the auditorium and smaller ones in the multiple spaces usually seen only as foyers.

The possibilities of a democratic, disciplinary theatre aroused me in Jerusalem particularly in one place. Outside the Damascus Gate, the triangular area of empty land on which we focused abuts the Arab central business district. Just to the East is the Christian Garden Tomb, meant to commemorate the Crucifixion. Next to that is a Muslim cemetery, as well as the remnants of a bus station serving Palestinian East Jerusalem. The triangle itself was, at the time of our journey, filled with buses and parked trucks, overflowing each morning with goods passing through the Gate to the old walled city. Modern Jerusalem pressed in on this open triangle—pressed, and threatened to explode. This was one of the city’s most contested sites.

Among the plans the team generated for the Damascus Gate under the general direction of the architect Moshe Safdie was a conference center fronting a new public plaza. The proposed conference center was in form a semicircular theater, meant to be built low, so that it would not loom over the walls of the old city. Parking for trucks and a new bus terminal were tucked beneath the plaza. This project was in many ways sensitive to its surroundings; hiding the vegetable and meat trucks below the plaza, for instance, helped cope with the intense heat of the sun. But the project lacked the political qualities of the other theaters I’ve described. A monument to discussion, divorced from the urban fabric of buildings around it, this meeting place did not draw the outside inside. Its open side gave out on an empty space, whereas it should have been turned toward the fabric of streets at its sides, or pushed much closer to the masses of people streaming in and out of the Damascus Gate to the old city.

However, these very limitations suggest one way of answering more completely Anwar Nusseibeh’s question: What is urban democracy?

In the long course of Western development, democracy has been a relatively rare way of life, and a way of life that appeared mostly in cities. Democratic participation has held out the hope of gathering together all people in a city. Ancient Athenians cherished this hope, as did citizens of medieval Italian communes and of German towns of the Reformation. To realize this hope of coming together, urban democracies sought for a unifying political space to which all citizens could relate—be it the agora, the Pnyx, the parades routes of the communes, or the city hall. Urban democracy meant centralized power in the sense of a single site with a single image, where all citizens could witness the workings of government.

In the modern era, the hope for democracy has become nearly universal, but the nature of democracy that people hope for has changed. National and even global visions of democracy are the old kind of urban democracy writ large, tending to focus attention on a single, representative political body. But against those visions has been set another: decentralized democracy, which does not aim at such cohesion. Instead, as the ideal of decentralized democracy first appears in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, power is portrayed as becoming more democratic by inviting participation, and thus becoming more fragmented and partial.

Belief in local, decentralized democracy has radical political implications. Taken to the limit, such a belief rejects a single description of the good state or refuses to define citizenship in terms of rights and obligations applicable to every citizen in just the same way. Instead, it argues that differences and divergences will develop in practice. The national or global polity will resemble a collage difficult to resolve into a single image.

Decentralized democracy is an attempt to make a political virtue out of fragmentation, an attempt that appears in demands for local, communal control of schools, welfare services, or building codes. Decentralized democracy also has a visual dimension. This democratic vision may prefer the jumbled, polyglot architecture of neighborhoods to the symbolic statements made by big, central buildings. It may reject the all-at-once, massive development of urban centers like Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, and seek instead for slower, less coherent growth throughout the city. The result of visual, decentralized democracy should be, ultimately, to shatter those images that attempt to represent the city as a whole.

Of course this is appealing; real life is local, concrete, particular. But the decentralization of power is in fact not so benign. Gated suburban communities exercise such local power; communities may decide, by quite democratic means, to exclude blacks, Jews, the elderly, or other “undesirables.” Even if the community is benign, the smaller a unit of power, the weaker it becomes. I think in this regard of the small communities in upstate New York fighting against IBM in recent years when the giant corporation downsized—the communities are simply too small to fight back effectively.

The word “decentralization” suggests the effort to break up an existing, comprehensive power or limit its disciplinary power. But, as de Tocqueville well understood, the process of attacking that central power, breaking it down to ever more local levels, can spin out of control so that ultimately there is no polity left at all; in the words of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there would remain only “individuals and families,” no image of the collective good with which individuals could identify.

So the problem is how to accept the virtues of fragmentation while combating isolation. This is the dilemma in designing a modern Pryx, and it necessitates innovation in form.

As the designers of London’s Half-Moon Theatre understood, a community center for sustained interaction has, in the context of the modern city, to be open to casual inspection and entry, as the proposal for Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate is not. We might think of a good Pryx today as a place with porous walls, so that people can be drawn in. In places like New York, where buildings can seldom be left unlocked, the same design principle can be applied to outdoor spaces, like the plaza at Lincoln Center—the central space attracts in party because the edge conditions of this plaza are amorphous.

Ando’s design suggests another architectural version of focus without closure/ This portable theater aims to share political activity without unifying it; Ando wants people, as it were, to share a common mental ground in acting locally. In a way, what Peter Eisenman has called “light architecture” correlates to political spaces that are local, focused, and yet porous. Think in Hispanic New York of La Marquetta on 116th Street, a kind of Latin United Nations. It needs only bleachers to become more than a commercial space.

In arguing for the political virtues and design possibilities of performance space, I don’t mean that we should forget about building public squares. Because cities gather together differences, strangers need a center, they need somewhere to meet and interact. But the stimulations of the center are not in themselves enough to create an urban polity; the polity further requires a place for discipline, focus, and duration. Decentralized polities especially need such places.

Democratic decision making, particularly at the local level, is not fulfilling. Local acts cannot realize all we are capable of imagining about how we ought or want to live; acting locally in the context of a city entails a loss of coherence, an acceptance of fragmentation. Democracy costs us something psychologically. This is why, in exploring the characteristics of democratic space, I’ve wanted to invoke Mr. Nusseibeh’s character. Here was a man who saw beyond his ailing electric company; his wealth and cosmopolitanism would have made it possible for him to have remained an exile in Paris. Yet he submitted to the discipline of living locally, and thus partially. Mr. Nusseibeh’s sense of the insufficiency of life as it actually manages to be lived seems to me relevant in this way to the experience of democracy. In a theater of democracy, his personally unsatisfying relations to others would be shared by his Israeli captors.

Perhaps this is what I should have replied when he demanded what an urban democracy looks like. He had only to look in a mirror.