Introductory online Workshop: “What is Democratic Economic Planning?”
This workshop is hosted by The New Centre for Research and Practice and is organized in partnership with INDEP.
It will consist of two sessions, which will be three hours each. The first session will be on April 30, the second one on May 7. Both will take place from 9am ET to 11am ET. The entire workshop will be in English.
The workshop will cost 125USD total, to sign up and learn more, click here.
It will be taught by Raphael Arar and Eric Meier. You can find their Bios below.
“This Roundtable explores Democratic Economic Planning (DEP) as an alternative to the financialized market-based economy. With neoliberalism in crisis and authoritarian movements on the rise, there’s renewed interest in how economies might be organized differently. Any proposal for economic planning has to answer several basic questions: How do you gather accurate information about what people need and what resources exist? What do you measure things in—money, labor time, physical units, some combination? Who makes decisions, and how centralized should that be? Do markets have any role, and if so, what kind? How do you motivate work and handle distribution? These questions are not new. They emerged in the Socialist Calculation Debate of the 1920s-30s. Answers have been attempted differently across historical experiments—from Soviet central planning to Chile’s Cybersyn project to contemporary participatory budgeting initiatives. Today’s proposals range from participatory economics to algorithmic coordination models that imagine repurposing Amazon’s logistics infrastructure for democratic ends.
SESSION ONE: The opening session will lay out this intellectual landscape and the core problems any planning model confronts. We’ll look at how these questions connect to contemporary concerns about technology, ecology, and democratic transition strategies.
SESSION TWO: The second session builds from student research to map current debates and identify where productive collective work might happen.
OUTCOMES: You’ll understand the fundamental challenges facing economic planning proposals and how different models tackle them. We’ll cover key historical debates and experiments alongside contemporary paradigms that leverage digital infrastructure. You’ll gain frameworks for evaluating whether planning proposals are actually democratic and practically viable, plus exposure to real-world implementations and transition strategies. And you’ll connect with others exploring alternatives to market coordination.”
Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. His work highlights the social, political and economic implications of technological acceleration and human-to-machine interaction. Raphael currently heads Design at One Project, an organization building infrastructure for a new economy where resources serve people and planet, not profit. He also serves as an Executive Board Member at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and a mentor at NEW INC, a museum-led cultural incubator from the NEW Museum. Previously, he led design for learners at Khan Academy, tackled ethical platforms of AI at IBM Research, taught media theory at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and designed over a hundred iOS apps with Apple. His artwork has been shown at museums, conferences, festivals and galleries internationally including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Moscow Museum of Applied Art, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Gamble House Museum, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Science Gallery, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival. Notable commissions include Dublab, Noema Magazine, Goethe Institut, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Intel Labs, and IBM Research. His design work has been featured in publications including TED, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, FastCompany, Wired and others.
Eric Meier is an organizer, researcher, and artist working on democratic economic planning, critical theory, and digital culture. He unites researchers, activists, and practitioners globally to advance the research and practice of democratic approaches to economic organization. He studies sociology and philosophy at the University of Bielefeld and is a certificate alumnus of the critical philosophy program at The New Centre. He co-founded INDEP – the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning, where he works as a strategic network facilitator. He also serves as a student assistant at the University of Kiel, where he supports Jan Groos, host of the Future Histories podcast, in the DFG project Governing Algorithms – A Sociology of the Algorithmic Art of Governing (led by Prof. Robert Seyfert). As an artist, his practice explores the topics of contemporary internet culture, (distorted) desire, and utopian imagination through digital image and video collage. His artistic practice has been presented in the 2023 exhibition Art, Design, Aesthetics of Democratic Economic Planning in Bonn—a show he conceptualized, curated and organized- the Science-Fiction Film Festival 2024 in Berlin and the 2025 exhibition Das Private ist Politisch in Bonn. His work has also appeared in publications by Rizomatica, Reincantamento, the Institute of Network Cultures and Rabble Review. He has spoken at a range of international events, including the 2024 Science-Fiction Film Festival Berlin, the 2024 London Ecosocialism Conference, the 2024 and 2025 Future Factory festivals in Rome and the 2025 INDEP conference in Montreal. He regularly hosts workshops, moderates panels, and appears as a guest on podcasts discussing democratic futures and transformative imaginaries.