POST-HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS · 009

When a City Starts Thinking Together

A post-hierarchical analysis of Aušra Teleišė’s “Today, Cities Are Looking for New Ways to Tell Their Stories”

Concepts marked with ? can be explained without leaving the article.

In Laura Jakavičienė’s interview with urban anthropologist Dr Aušra Teleišė, Alytus appears not as a single urban object, but as an intersection of different periods, functions and emotional relationships. The city can be read by walking from its old resort area and green spaces through residential districts to the industrial zone in the north. Such a journey becomes more than a tour of separate sites: it is a model of the city’s development. Green Alytus, the Alytus of Soviet industrialisation, the contemporary city valued for everyday quality of life, and the shrinking city searching for a future all exist at the same time.

Teleišė’s approach matters because she does not search for one “true” identity of the city. For some residents Alytus is primarily nature; for others it is industry and employment; for still others these identities do not contradict one another. Even Soviet industrial heritage is neither simply rejected nor uncritically celebrated: it is an accumulation of social biographies, work, communities, pride and uncertainty. Urban identity is therefore produced not only by architecture, but also by memory, everyday habits, emotions and what people choose to tell others.

From a post-hierarchical perspective, this is almost a natural move from the city as an administered territory to the city as a multiple subject. Yet the text stops at a threshold that is becoming crucial today. If a city is made by many different experiences, why should their role end with storytelling, dialogue or consultation? Why could they not become part of the city’s decision-making infrastructure itself?

Text analysed: Laura Jakavičienė, interview with urban anthropologist Dr Aušra Teleišė, “Antropologė A. Teleišė: ‘Šiandien miestai ieško naujų būdų pasakoti apie save’” [“Anthropologist A. Teleišė: ‘Today, Cities Are Looking for New Ways to Tell Their Stories’”], Bernardinai.lt, 30 July 2026.
Source: Bernardinai.lt, 2026-07-30
Context: Alytus City Municipality publication. The interview is connected with the open-architecture weekend “Pastatai kalba. Alytus” (“Buildings Speak. Alytus”), scheduled for 12–13 September 2026.

Context: Alytus between the green city and industrialisation

The background to the interview is the project “Pastatai kalba. Alytus”, which invites people to read the city’s history through architecture, public spaces and lived experience. Alytus is especially revealing in this respect because its physical structure allows different stages of modernisation to be experienced almost bodily. Green areas, the memory of the interwar and resort city, residential districts built during the Soviet period, and a large industrial zone are not merely different views of the city. They embody different economic logics, ways of life and value systems.

Teleišė rightly avoids the simple opposition of “nature or industry”. For Alytus, industry meant not only pollution or Soviet urbanism; it also meant jobs, migration into the city, social mobility, new neighbourhoods and the life trajectories of entire families. At the same time, the 2019 fire at a tyre-recycling plant showed that economic benefit and environmental risk are not abstract categories: they can collide very directly within the same territory and the same community.

Another layer is the demographic future. The interview reveals a paradox: many people regard Alytus as a comfortable, calm city with a high quality of everyday life, while a sense of the “shrinking city” persists alongside anxiety about young people leaving and limited professional prospects. This tension is important. It shows that a city’s attractiveness for everyday life and its attractiveness as a place in which to build a life trajectory are not the same thing.

What is especially valuable in the text

First, the article de-hierarchises urban identity. It does not allow tourism communication, an urban-planning expert or a historian alone to declare what Alytus “really” is. The city emerges from different relationships: for one person the Dailidė lakes are the centre of daily life; for another the defining urban landmark is the factory where their family worked; for a third it is the possibility of reaching nature within minutes.

Second, Teleišė brings emotions into urban analysis. Pride and uncertainty are not treated as subjective noise to be removed in pursuit of an “objective” history. Emotions show where collective memory is settled and where it remains unresolved. This is close to the diagnostics of complex systems: emotional intensity can signal a point at which different values, experiences and unfinished conflicts intersect.

Third, the article refuses a convenient sanitisation of history. An authentic city, in Teleišė’s account, is not one that represents only what it can be proud of. Authenticity emerges when ambiguous periods remain present in the shared narrative. This is an important post-hierarchical principle: a common field should not be cleaned up until only meanings acceptable to the dominant group remain.

The post-hierarchical turn: not who tells the city, but who decides it

The title of the interview says that cities are looking for new ways to tell their stories. Post-hierarchy would change the question more radically. The problem is not only the form of storytelling. The problem is who has the right to turn urban experience into a decision.

Traditional urban governance tends to follow a clear sequence. Administrations and politicians set priorities; specialists prepare strategies; communication professionals formulate the city’s image; residents are invited to consultations, surveys or public hearings. Even when the consultation is sincere, the cognitive hierarchy remains intact: the centre gathers opinions from people at the periphery and then decides which of them will become policy.

In a post-hierarchical city, residents are not an “audience” from which opinions are collected. They become participants in one decision system. This does not make the urban planner, economist or environmental specialist less important. On the contrary, their competence becomes more valuable, but it is no longer equated with a right to define the goal alone. Experts help test causal relations, risks, costs and feasibility; residents, businesses, communities and other affected groups bring into the system distributed information that no centre can possess by itself.

One formulation in the interview is especially revealing: the “dialogue between the city and its residents”. Within hierarchical thinking this sounds natural: “the city” is almost imperceptibly equated with the municipality, the administration or an institutional centre, while residents become the other side of the dialogue. Ontologically, however, residents are not an external partner of the city. They are the city itself. The city also consists of companies, schools, hospitals, public spaces, the river, transport flows, informal networks, memories and interdependencies. The municipality is an essential node in this system, but it is not the whole subject.

Urban memory: not an archive, but a sensor network

Teleišė’s attention to collective memory allows one further step. In a post-hierarchical city, memory would matter not only because it helps create a richer story. It can function as a social sensor network. People’s narratives show where value was created, where loss was experienced, which places had social importance, where an institutional decision produced unforeseen consequences, and which earlier compromises are still shaping the present.

Industrial heritage is a good example. The question “should we be proud of it or condemn it?” is too narrow, because it compresses a complex phenomenon into a single moral judgement. It is more productive to separate it into several dimensions: the history of labour and technology, urban impact, ecological damage, social relations, architectural value, the context of the occupying regime, personal biographies and the present use of the territory. Different groups may evaluate these dimensions differently and still agree on a concrete decision.

Post-hierarchy therefore does not try to eliminate disagreement. It tries to make disagreement informative. If one part of Alytus sees industry as a condition of economic stability while another sees it as an ecological risk, the task is not to force one side to “understand” the other or to invent a compromise slogan. The task is to determine what kind of industry, what level of pollution, what kind of jobs, what safeguards and what ratio of economic benefit are acceptable. Identity conflict can then become a solvable problem.

How Alytus’s questions could be solved post-hierarchically

Teleišė identifies demography and people’s ability to imagine a future in Alytus as one of the city’s main challenges. In a post-hierarchical architecture, this question would not immediately be converted into a strategic slogan such as “attract young people” or “build an appealing city”. The first task would be to unfold the structure of the problem collectively.

1. Formulate the problem as a state, not as a promotional goal. For example: too small a share of young and middle-aged people regard Alytus as a place where it is realistic to plan their professional and family life for the next ten years. Such a formulation forces the system to search for causes rather than immediately design a campaign.
2. Create a cognitive, not merely representative, participant field. It should include school students, university students, people who have left and returned, industrial workers, businesses, cultural actors, families with children, older residents, urban planners, environmental specialists, teachers and municipal staff. The aim is not to reproduce society proportionally but to gather the greatest possible diversity of information about the problem.
3. Separate ideas from status. Participants anonymously submit causes, solutions and alternatives and evaluate other proposals without seeing whether their author is a mayor, professor, businessperson, school student or pensioner. This reduces the influence of authority, office and rhetorical power.
4. Measure not only popularity, but also agreement and polarisation. A highly rated idea that unites different groups is not equivalent to an idea with the same average score that inspires one group while radically alienating another. Polarisation itself becomes diagnostic information.
5. Bring experts in where reality has to be tested. Economists calculate scenarios for jobs and investment; environmental specialists test pollution and risk limits; urban planners assess spatial consequences; historians provide heritage context. Expert knowledge modifies alternatives, but expert status does not by itself decide what future the city must choose.
6. Turn decisions into bounded experiments. Instead of one ten-year vision, the city can test several measures in parallel—return-to-work and return-to-study programmes, industrial-site conversion models, new functions for public spaces, cultural and nature routes, housing or mobility solutions—and measure their effects.
7. Return feedback into the same system. Urban policy becomes not a document stored on a server for five years after approval, but a continuously updated system of hypotheses and results. Every implemented solution creates new data and a new cycle of collective evaluation.

Competence remains, but ceases to be rank

The most common objection to such an architecture is straightforward: can everyone design a city? No—if “design” means calculating a bridge, modelling traffic flows, evaluating soil properties or preparing a statutory planning document. But it does not follow that an expert alone knows best what kind of city residents should create.

In post-hierarchy, competence becomes a function. Experts carry greater weight where their knowledge can be verified and where specialised information is necessary for a decision. Residents have irreplaceable competence in the field of everyday experience: they know where it is actually unsafe to cross a street, why a family is considering leaving, why a particular public space does not work, what social role a closed factory used to play, or what is missing for someone to start a business. This knowledge is not inferior; it is a different kind of knowledge.

In such a system, the municipal council and administration do not disappear either. They retain legal duties, budget responsibility and implementation functions. But they no longer oppose a collectively refined result merely with an institutional opinion. If a formal decision-maker chooses another path, it should explain what new information, legal constraint or responsibility argument justifies departing from the shared cognitive result.

From city branding to a living urban state

Contemporary cities invest heavily in image: they search for a sign, a slogan, distinctiveness, visual identity and a small number of easily communicable stories. This is understandable in a competitive environment of tourism, investment and resident attraction. Yet the logic carries a risk: urban complexity is reduced to a product that has to be positioned clearly.

Teleišė’s Alytus resists this already through its own structure. It can be green and industrial, shrinking and comfortable to live in. These characteristics are not a marketing mistake. They are reality. Post-hierarchical urban communication should not try to smooth away this contradiction. It could show how the city thinks through its contradictions and what it does with them.

The urban story would then become not the beginning of strategy but its output. If residents of Alytus, experts, businesses and institutions collectively establish what kind of industry is compatible with the quality of life of a green city, how industrial heritage should be used, what conditions would allow people to plan a future in Alytus and which experiments actually work, communication professionals no longer need to invent an identity. They can tell the story of a real process of shared thinking.

The city as a collective subject

Aušra Teleišė’s perspective is valuable because it no longer reduces the city to buildings, plans or official history. In her account, Alytus is a system of overlapping periods, spaces, biographies and emotions. Post-hierarchy proposes that this anthropological intuition be completed institutionally.

If a city has many memories, it needs more than a polyphonic exhibition. If it has many interests, it needs more than a public hearing. If knowledge is distributed throughout it, it needs more than expert consultation. It needs an architecture in which many people can systematically propose, test and evaluate alternatives, while competence is used where it is needed without taking possession of the entire decision.

In such a city, “green” and “industrial” no longer have to compete for the right to become the single definition of Alytus. Every concrete question—a new factory, conversion of an old industrial site, the function of a public space, policy for young families or the interpretation of cultural heritage—can be addressed separately by involving those who will be affected and those who possess relevant knowledge.

A post-hierarchical city begins when people do more than tell the city their stories. It begins when the city can use those stories, that knowledge and those conflicts to collectively produce better decisions. At that point, the city is no longer merely searching for a new way to talk about itself. It has started to think together.

flowchart TD
    A["Multiple urban experiences"] --> B["Shared problem identification"]
    B --> C["Anonymous alternatives"]
    C --> D["Consensus and polarization map"]
    D --> E["Expert reality check"]
    E --> F["Limited experiments"]
    F --> G["New data and feedback"]
    G -.-> B
    G --> H["City as a collective subject"]
    classDef input fill:#f4f1ea,stroke:#6f6d66,color:#191916
    classDef process fill:#e9e5dc,stroke:#6f6d66,color:#191916
    classDef post fill:#f4f1ea,stroke:#a93b2b,color:#191916,stroke-width:2px
    class A input
    class B,C,D,E,F,G process
    class H post