Paper short abstract:

Charting the efforts of Sheffield City Council to rewrite its governance system, this paper highlights how attending to the culture of the council could help heal democratic relationships and offer fresh solutions to problems of political unwellness in the city.

Paper long abstract:

Sheffield is a city in which the legitimacy of local democratic representation has, in recent years, drifted into the arena of the politically unwell. Between 2016 and 2018 protests erupted over the felling of street trees in the city. The street trees controversy attracted national attention; yet few outside Sheffield appreciated how these protests extended to a deeper sense of democratic disconnect. A pervading sense of political unwellness manifests itself in relationships characterised by mistrust and misunderstanding - citizens complained of being unable to contribute in meaningful ways to decisions impacting on their lives. This crisis of democratic representation culminated in a citizen-led referendum campaign which forced the council, against the wishes of many of its members, to reconsider its ways of working and move to a new governance system.

This paper – drawing on three years of ethnographic research – asks whether it is possible to represent a city as distinct and diverse as Sheffield. It does so by charting the efforts of Sheffield City Council to rewrite its constitution and highlights the accompanying need to reimagine the culture of the council. The paper concludes by forwarding anthropology’s capacity to diagnose democracy’s ongoing ills and suggest possibilities to return to health the relationships that shape politics in the city.