Modern politics was born with a promise: that citizens, when giving up part of their natural freedom, could found a more fair order, protected by common laws and governed by the collective will. That promise, the so -called “social contract”, was the great enlightened ideal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood that true freedom is not to do what you want, but to obey a law that one has contributed to create. That was, and remains, the republican essence of the covenant: an order where power is legitimized not from above, but from popular sovereignty.
But today, that formula seems exhausted. The institutions that should guarantee rights are distant, the representation has become opaque, and public life has been replaced by administrative management or the permanent show.
In parallel, another phenomenon advances without pause: the city. The cities have become the center of gravity of the world. There knowledge, work, conflict and creation are concentrated. While the party is wearing up, cities grow as spaces of innovation, resistance and future. It is no accident: where the old contract is broken, the need to A new pact.
We live in a deep transformation. Internal and global migrations reconfigure the social map. The work no longer resembles the one we met: platforms, automation, artificial intelligence and collaborative economies are changing the rules of the game. Leisure is no longer a pause, but an industry. Knowledge is democratized, but is also privatized in the hands of large corporations. Technologies multiply possibilities, but also surveillance. In this context, inherited political structures, designed for another era, begin to creak.
What if the problem is not politics, but its form? And if the social contract of the 21st century is not signed in the palaces of power, but in neighborhoods, networks, cultural spaces, urban movements, innovation laboratories, digital cooperatives?
We need to think about “Urban Contract “. A new collective agreement that recognizes the challenges of this time: urban economy, artificial intelligence, the need for decent employment, real citizen participation, the ethics of care. It is no longer enough to manage. It is time to imagine. To deliberate. To propose other ways of living, producing and deciding.
In this process, it is key to recover the true meaning of the freedom. Not as a slogan of a party or as an electoral slogan, but as Common Heritage of Citizens. Freedom is not exhausted in the election every two years or is guaranteed by decree: it is built every day, in the right to participate, to dissent, to decide on what affects us. Being free today also implies being able to inhabit a fair city, having access to knowledge, having real opportunities, being recognized as a full subject of rights.
This new pact will not be vertical or uniform. It will be multiple, distributed, alive. It will not replace the law, but it will make sense. He will not eliminate governments, but will force them to listen. He will not supplant politics, but he will invite her to reinvent himself.
The urban contract is not a utopia. It is an urgency. Because what is at stake is not only the political system, but the possibility of building a freer, more just, more human community.
Jorge Giorno He was a deputy in the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires on two occasions and president of the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE), currently presides over the Party of the Cities in Action.
Source: Ambito
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