Book
HOW TO CIVIC? What Transforming Institutions Can Do for Us
Editor: Matylda Krzykowski
Copy Editor: Louisa Elderton
Assistant Editor: Maria Maddalena Lenzi
Design: Tristesse Basel
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
Launch: Spring 2027
Language: English / 300–400 pages.
Basel Academy of Art & Design
This HOW TO CIVIC? handbook aims to come from doing—from small gestures, experiments, and practices learned inside and at the margins of institutions. It’s a public, imperfect, relational manual shaped by people showing up, making room, and insisting on doing something else or a bit more.
How is the ever-remaining question. How do we stay open, generous, porous? How do we not just talk about change but actually practice it? And what does it mean to be an institution—not as a fixed structure, but as a joint ongoing, lived activity?
It always comes down to time, space, labour, and relationality in their most lived forms. How much space do institutions, or places outside of them, make for people to show up as themselves, and how much do they take without noticing? Labour is central too: the visible work that’s rewarded, and the invisible work that sustains everything. Participation sits at the centre of this, because to take part is to give finite resources like attention, energy, and care.
Since activating our 400 square-meter ground-floor civic space—simply called CIVIC, standing for civic engagement, assembly, education, pedagogy, and people—it has functioned less as a room and more as an aspiration: an ideology, a wish, and a practice of openness. From the outset, we initiated and invited participatory formats, yet what proved most effective were Open Calls. Openness meant deliberately working with people we don’t know and had not collaborated with before—through the open call for a project during Art Basel, or with contributors previously unknown to us. It also meant maintaining anonymous selection processes, as with the CIVIC Billboard and actively shaping conditions that make participation and activation accessible.
This book is aimed to be a practical and reflective handbook grounded in practice, focused on creating, sustaining, and reimagining civic spaces across both institutional and informal contexts. Bridging sociology, spatial theory, art, design, and architecture, the handbook wants to draw on experiences gathered external, global, contributions and through experiences at CIVIC at the Basel Academy of Art and Design.
OPEN CALL
Submit an image* until June 15, 2026.
*Image/meme/sketch/graphic/diagram/screenshot/visual.
**Civic spaces are environments—physical or digital—that allow people to freely gather, speak, organize, and participate in public life.
CIVIC is a social infrastructure and an educational and experimental place for students, teachers, and the public, situated on the ground floor of the high-rise building of Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, since January 2022.
Artistic Lead: Matylda Krzykowski
Project Lead: Ligia Tarcea (previously Jenni Schmitt (2022 – 2024, Anita Muçolli 2024 – March 2026)
Initiator: Claudia Perren