A public theatre as a living lab to create resilience

2.1 ULLs AS RESILIENCE INFRASTRUCTURES

In recent debates on resilience and resources (MacKinnon & Derickson 2013), ULLs have emerged as situated, participatory infrastructures that foster local resilience through experimentation, co-design and knowledge co-production. ULLs enable communities to access and make decisions on urban resources, especially under conditions of socio-ecological transition (Rizzo et al. 2021). Here, resilience extends beyond institutional risk management. Instead, it is framed as relational, processual and deeply embedded in place-based practices (Cermeño et al. 2022; Belfield & Petrescu 2024). Resilience practices that informed the design and implementation of Masca’s ULL are discussed below.

2.2 IMAGINATION, ASPIRATION, RESILIENCE

By facilitating knowledge co-creation, shared spaces and experimentation with alternative governance, ULLs have been praised for igniting imaginaries of alternative futures (Karvonen & Van Heur 2014). Yet the capacity to imagine is unevenly distributed: the capacity to imagine is itself culturally mediated, shaped by historical processes (Appadurai 2013) and embedded in the geographies of communities as processual articulations of social relations (Massey 1994).

As Appadurai (2013) argues, imagination is not simply merely individual or artistic, but a dimension of everyday collective life, constrained or expanded by institutions, access to resources and dominant narratives. Under conditions of globalisation, ULLs must recognise the capacity to aspire and imagine as a cultural practice, requiring a rethinking of culture not as the opposite of economy but as force capable of transforming socio-economic logics when understood beyond tradition, heritage, custom (Appadurai 2013: 158–159).

This perspective orients cultural institutions towards the future, as hopes, desires and aspirations are encouraged, mobilised or suppressed by institutional, material and social infrastructures. As:

they have remained largely invisible in socio-cultural approaches. However, they are central to ULL processes, which actively engage these dimensions in their design and implementation activities. Accordingly, this article considers both anticipated (i.e. established) resilience practices and emergent resilience. The latter arise from context-specific limitations, power relations and socio-cultural norms that shape how imagination is materialised through ULLs.

This focus is crucial for addressing ‘the crisis of the imagination’ identified as a unique challenge of the ecological crisis (Haiven 2014). Overlooked due to the marginalisation of culture and desire in postcapitalist politics theories (Fisher 2009), this inability to imagine remains a challenge to developing new geopolitical strategies (Sutherland 2023: 99).

3.1 LOCAL AND NATIONAL CONTEXT

Founded in 1990 as the only pantomime and bodily expression theatre in Romania, Masca received its first venue in 1996, a dilapidated former cinema in Bucharest’s Militari neighbourhood. In 2005, the building was consolidated and renovated to enable on-site performances. In 2023, theatre director Catinca Drăgănescu was appointed Interim Director. With experience in independent and community-based art and artistic research exploring links between culture, communities and the environment, she introduced a vision interrogating the role of theatre in the face of current ecological challenges. Her arrival ignited the reassessment of Masca’s position within its local social context, which she summarised as follows (Figure 2):

Figure 2

The theatre subsequently expanded community engagement, establishing teen and senior theatre groups, thus aligning artistic practice with local social dynamics.

The Militari neighbourhood (approximately 400,000 residents in 2022) is a dense housing area with limited community and cultural infrastructure. It exemplifies Bucharest’s socialist-era urban expansion, dominated by dense high-rise housing estates of the 1960s–70s (Figure 3). Products of Romania’s systematisation policy, these areas followed planned grids integrating cultural and social facilities (cultural centres, theatres, libraries), within walking distance, embedding cultural participation in everyday life.

Figure 3

Post-1990 decentralisation dismantled much of this socio-cultural infrastructure without viable alternatives, shifting responsibility from the Ministry of Culture to local authorities. This increased dependence on local political actors and weakened the role of cultural institutions as community anchors (Gog et al. 2021). Romania’s network of cultural centres declined from roughly 6000 in the 1980s to fewer than 600 today (Croitoru et al. 2020: 79). Cultural institutions were increasingly redirected toward commercial or political uses, undermining accessibility, education and social cohesion and, in turn, democracy itself, visibly amid rising populism during the 2025 presidential election.

Today, Romania’s public cultural sector remains chronically underfunded and marginal in policy and budgeting, limiting social engagement (INCF 2025). Major Bucharest theatres increasingly rely on project-based revenue, accelerating the commercialisation of public culture, while managers often lack formal management training. Public theatres outside the city centre face limited financial autonomy and rigid bureaucracies.

3.2 MASCA’S ULL

Within this fragile landscape, Masca navigates conflicting administrative dynamics shaped by institutional fragmentation arising from different political affiliations and procedural gaps in municipal administration. While regulated and minimally funded by the General Municipality of Bucharest (PMB), it is the only public theatre located in District 6 (S6), one of Bucharest’s six districts, governed by a separate municipality (District 6 Municipality—PS6). Although Masca’s team views the theatre as serving S6’s residents, its mandate—defined by the Organisational and Operational Regulations (ROF)—restricts it to show-producing, limiting the integration of new functions (e.g. ecological education, community co-design).

Masca’s ambition to evolve into a hybrid infrastructure combining artistic production with community development requires renegotiating its mandate, a process that is both administrative and political. Fragmented PMB–PS6 coordination exacerbates this misalignment (Drăgănescu 2024) reflecting broader limits to public institutional innovation in Romania’s post-socialist context (Tsenkova & Nedovic-Budic 2006; Petrescu & Marin 2025).

Like most Romanian public cultural institutions, Masca faces chronic underfunding and lacks multi-annual or structural support. In 2024, it operated with minimal staff and a modest budget that precluded infrastructural investments, despite significant maintenance needs. During Masca’s ULL, essential utilities and repairs were funded indirectly through small project grants, temporarily redirecting funds from community engagement. Participatory interventions were only possible through short-term external National Fund for Culture (AFCN) funding and extended staff and collaborators voluntary labour (such as actors, administrative and technical staff participating in the garden refurbishment), reflecting regional structural fragility (Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends 2023). Such precarity restricts long-term planning and institutionalisation of emerging practices, placing Masca under a ‘tyranny of emergency’ whose impact is to constrain planning time horizons and, in turn, the capacity to imagine and implement transformative change (Appadurai 2013: 8).

Despite these constraints, Masca’s vision audaciously places its transformation within European frameworks for ecological transition in culture, aspiring to become Romania’s first green theatre and join the European Theatre Convention (ETC). ULL activities (recycling stage sets, initiating urban gardening practices and running workshops on ecological care) align with the ETC’s four strategic axes: energy efficiency, resource reuse, ecological education and community engagement (ETC 2021). These initiatives point towards a form of ‘cross-border activism’ where global and local dynamics reinforce democratic practice (Appadurai 2013: 4). While the former reflects anticipated resilience practices, the latter dimension reveals the need to attend to forms of emergent resilience surfacing in local contexts and transnational networks.

With objectives aligned to UF2024, Masca entered the programme and temporarily repositioned itself as a ULL, demonstrating several characteristics (JPI Urban Europe 2022):

• Facilitating multi-stakeholder inclusion and engagement by partnering with interdisciplinary action-research teams (researchers and students from the Association for Urban Transition, the National University for Cinema and Theatre, the Ion Mincu University for Architecture and Urbanism), engaging municipal authorities, activating residents through participatory activities and exploring collaboration with local businesses.

• Responding to local needs and challenges through workshops on sustainability, creative expression and collective work, supporting social cohesion and ecological capacity-building.

• Integrating methodological flexibility and facilitating learning and feedback by working with an interdisciplinary AAA research team to design participatory activities, negotiate of different claims and use physical infrastructure (recycled stage sets, garden space) for ecological learning.

• Operating at a local scale and drawing on situated knowledge by collaborating with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) experienced in working with low-engagement communities.

The UF2024 facilitated this repositioning within a shared conceptual and methodological framework based on the Quintuple Helix (H5) (Carayannis et al. 2012). This collaborative model, discussed further in the Methods section, provides a multi-stakeholder ecology-anchored framework for generating innovation through knowledge exchange and collaboration across different societal sectors.

4.1 APPROACH, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This article draws on the interdisciplinary action-research methodology (Bradbury 2015) developed during Masca’s ULL in Bucharest between February and October 2024. The ULL aimed to explore how a cultural institution could expand its public function into a hybrid participatory model: as both a show-producing venue and a community hub cultivating socio-ecological resilience. The methods for reaching this aim were defined based on the following:

• Specialist literature on resilience and comparable cases focused on sustainable commoning practices (Petrescu & Petcou 2023; Rizzo et al. 2021; Bulkeley et al. 2018; ETC 2021), which indicated that activities such as urban gardening, stage set recycling and collective creative expression were key activities that sustained socio-ecological resilience; these overlapped with areas with strong potential available to Masca.

• The H5 transdisciplinary model which promoted a system of knowledge exchange between multiple stakeholders (Carayannis et al. 2012) and underlined the correlation between ecological performance and democratic practice (Carayannis et al. 2021). This presented the potential for Masca to enter into partnerships that would maximise the impact of social, financial and knowledge-based resources.

• Team members’ previous experience in similar, relevant initiatives which made available both a strong social network and expertise on which to build the ULL.

As noted, Masca’s ULL adopted the H5 model as a core conceptual and methodological framework promoted by UF2024 to address socio-ecological resilience (Enache et al. 2025). An evolution of earlier models (Carayannis & Campbell 2009), H5 conceptualises innovation as the interwoven development and operation of five knowledge-producing systems: academia (education and research); business/industry (economic structures and markets); government (policy and public institutions); civil society (cultural norms, values and lifestyles); and environment (natural ecosystems and sustainability practices). By explicitly integrating environmental and civic dimensions, H5 situates innovation as a systemic, transdisciplinary response to complex challenges such as climate change, inequality and urban transformation (Carayannis et al. 2012; Scholl et al. 2022). Further, research applying the H5 model suggests that democracy and ecological performance are interdependent, with countries with greater political freedom being correlated with more impactful environmental performance, while lesser political freedom contexts decrease environmental performance (Carayannis et al. 2021).

Informed by these premises, the ULL objectives were:

• to facilitate co-production and embedding of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988) by engaging residents while maintaining a city-wide public

• to generate ‘resourceful infrastructures’ (Petrescu & Petcou 2023) by materialising initial actions towards sustainable transition (e.g. garden renovation, mural creation, stage set recycling)

• to prototype the H5 model, testing alternative logics of urban coexistence and co-production.

4.2 TIMELINE, TEAM AND TOOLS

The ULL unfolded in two consecutive phases (Figure 4), each operating under different frameworks. The first phase, the participatory diagnostic, was implemented within UF2024; the second, the participatory design, was developed independently with AFCN funding. The participatory diagnostic was the exploratory phase of the ULL. It aimed to ‘diagnose’ the context of the ULL, i.e. to identify key practices, relationships and elements that shaped the ULL’s setting.

Figure 4

Team composition followed the UF2024 framework, combining an interdisciplinary research component (architecture/urban planning, anthropology/sociology, arts) and a host component (Masca’s interim director and an actress/event coordinator). Together, the ULL team distilled the overall objectives into specific and pertinent research goals: understanding local spatial and social dynamics; identifying Masca’s existing and potential publics; and exploring partnerships in the H5 model. Drawing on the UF2024 curriculum (Urboteca n.d.) and action research literature (Urban Commons Research Collective 2022), the team selected appropriate tools including: exploratory group walks (n = 2), elicitation activities (n = 15), exploratory questionnaires (n = 90), stakeholder analysis and semi-structured interviews (n = 18). These tools revealed Masca’s public’s limited awareness of the theatre’s current programmes, lack of neighbourhood socialising spaces and overlapping interests among H5 actors, suggesting potential social and material resources (see Appendix 1 in the supplemental data online).

The participatory design focused on implementing and testing socio-ecological resilience practices. Funding conditions restructured the team: the authors continued as anthropologist and artist, coordinating H5 collaboration and activities, while Masca’s full staff (creative, administrative, technical) engaged in implementation. NGOs on architecture/urban planning, urban biodiversity and sustainability joined as workshop facilitators.

Through interdisciplinary dialogue and the team’s expertise, the ULL team developed the participatory design framework aligned with the action-research aim of exploring Masca’s potential as a hybrid cultural and community institution. Semi-structured interviews (n = 18) and questionnaires (n = 52) deepened understanding of participants’ visions and needs. Three five-day participatory workshops on recycling and sustainability, biodiversity and community, collective imagination and belonging aimed to bridge expert knowledge and situated knowledges (Haraway 1988), and to materialise co-produced objects and commoning practices to strengthen trust and social cohesion. Workshop themes and formats were agreed collectively by the ULL team and the specifics of participatory approaches refined with workshop facilitators.

A neighbourhood festival was included to engage residents, local administration and local businesses, while the roundtable event, The Dialogue Table, provided a performative setting to prototype the H5 model.

These methods aligned with recent developments in urban experimentation and transformative planning (Bulkeley et al. 2018; Cermeño et al. 2022), and targeted what this article terms ‘anticipated resilience practices’, i.e. established resilient actions (recycling/reuse, community-building, transdisciplinary partnerships) distinct from emergent resilience forms which are analysed below (see Appendix 2 in the supplemental data online).

4.3 THE ULL’s PARTICIPANTS

The ULL aimed to activate members from all H5 domains: academia, administration, business, community and environmental organisations. The communication strategy included a dedicated webpage, press releases, social media, posters and flyers. Priority was given to engaging Militari residents, given Masca’s position as the only public theatre in a peripheral Bucharest neighbourhood.

Although heterogenous, the local residents share everyday constraints: limited cultural and community spaces, long commutes, and a history of mistrust in public life (Umbreș 2022). The ULL team therefore built on the theatre’s existing audience while expanding outreach through word of mouth, neighbourhood posters, local Facebook groups and invitations to schools. Workshop-specific calls were issued, and WhatsApp groups were created (with consent) to sustain engagement and a sense of community. Apart from the specialised Recycling & Repurposing Stage Set Workshop for stage design students, workshops attracted diverse participants in age and backgrounds (see Appendix 2 in the supplemental data online). Participation was voluntary and flexible, with clear communication about expectations and the right to withdraw.

4.4 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

All activities were documented through field notes, photographs and audio-video recordings, and discussed in regular team debriefings. Data collection and analysis were conducted throughout the ULL’s implementation and the article draws on the following:

• Stakeholder analysis

  Mapping interest and power across H5 domains and revising the map iteratively to identify opportunities for knowledge exchange and collaboration.

• Turning points analysis

  Drawing on Tripp’s (1993) critical incidents framework, identifying moments of alignment, tension or disruption, including shifts in engagement, decision-making milestones, conflicts and collective material outcomes.

• Thematic analysis of interviews and fieldnotes

  Collectively identifying core themes and subthemes (Hemphill & Richards 2018) related to education, culture, community and environment.

4.5 ETHICS AND REFLEXIVE PRACTICE

All participation was voluntary and based on informed consent with attention to accessibility for elderly residents or those with limited digital literacy.

Reflexivity was embedded through formal debriefings and informal check-ins addressing positionalities, team and stakeholder relationships dynamics, or the limits of ULL influence within an asymmetrical institutional context marked by precarity and short-term funding. While the methodology championed interdisciplinary action-research, its implementation was complex. For many team members, UF2024 represented a first interdisciplinary research experience, revealing disciplinary blind spots and tensions arising from different temporal pressures (e.g. funder-imposed timeline for deliverables versus researchers advocating for longer timelines necessary for the participatory process). The positionalities of the two authors were critical: Maria Drăghici’s insider’s knowledge of Bucharest’s cultural funding landscape complemented Alina Apostu’s outsider’s perspective following a 14-year absence from Romania, together facilitating reflexive dialogue and conflict mediation within the team.

5.1 CAPACITY TO BUILD COLLECTIVE ACTION

In adopting the H5 collaboration model, Masca pursued what could be seen as a risky strategy: facilitating collaborations across five sectors in a socio-political context marked by deep tensions, particularly between administration, business and environmental NGOs (Dragnea et al. 2025). By identifying both present and potential configurations of interest and power (Figure 5), Masca’s ULL sought to initiate the knowledge exchanges system described in the H5 model (Carayannis et al. 2012: 6–9) where each stakeholder’s domain produces an output for and receives an input from the others, thus maximising capacity for ecological innovation and the benefits across all domains. While its implementation encountered various turning points (see Appendix 3 in the supplemental data online), the analysis points to emergent resilience forms shaped by the socio-political specificities in which the ULL operated (e.g. reliance on informal networks).

Figure 5

5.1.2 Community and environmental NGOs

Facing stringent financial pressures, trust-based informal relationships between one author and Masca’s interim director enabled the navigation of another turning point: joining UF2024. The UF2024 participatory consolidated the subsequent AFCN funding application, securing funds for participatory design. This resourcefulness—maximising temporary partnerships and funds—enabled the provisional materialisation of a vision that prefigured alternative roles for a public cultural institution.

Environmental NGOs registered a high interest due to previously disregarded overlapping aims and interests, noted by one NGO volunteer:

[In Romania] the cultural sphere is very cut off from the ecological sphere, I have not seen similar initiatives [like the one at Masca]. I think a collaboration would enrich both sides.

However, the NGOs involved recognised their limited power to effect change. Thus, while they could provide the output of green know-how described by the H5 model (Carayannis et al. 2012: 8), they were limited by financial and procedural constraints which produced further turning points, such as delays in workshop organisation. Again, informal networks among the ULL team provided flexibility, allowing roles to shift and activities to proceed.

Other turning points arose from the theatre’s limited organigram and were overcome by adopting flexible roles, such as researchers acting as facilitators. During the Street Art Workshop, participatory methods were ‘a challenge I’d never encountered [which] involved improvisation and problem solving’ for the artist and one workshop lead; meanwhile, the curator (and second workshop lead) highlighted negotiation challenges in co-creation:

It’s hard to create a mural with several authors […] everyone wants to impose their authorship.

Through repeated discussions on participatory principles, joint evaluation of the workshop structure and accompanying the facilitators during workshops, the researchers supported interdisciplinary translation during the participatory design phase. Frictions were thus transformed into productive learning experiences as the artist noted:

Chaos erupted […] but it was a good result. We kept the purity of the participatory act rather than beautifying it afterward.

Participants were surprised and excited to paint freely and leave their mark on the theatre’s decommissioned van, integrated in the garden refurbishment.

The ‘community’ proved heterogenous and fluid, ranging from sustained workshop and interview participation to fluctuating engagement. While Masca’s regular audience was city-wide, 43% of questionnaire respondents lived in S6. Older respondents (more than 50 years of age) associated Masca with its early gestural plays and had little recent experience, while under-50s recognised it as a neighbourhood landmark. Exploratory walks showed elderly people and children using the limited public spaces, highlighting potential groups to be activated. Questionnaires and follow-up interviews revealed interest in community gardening (72%), skills workshops (67%) and a library/study space (32%), alongside mistrust and limited experience of collective practices. As one young woman resident noted, ‘people are afraid to talk to each other’ and change required ‘spaces where people feel safe’. Through an H5 lens, community members in this setting need empowerment to take ownership of their civic roles and provide the inputs in the form of participation and opinion toward the governance stakeholders, as the model describes (Carayannis et al. 2012: 8).

These findings underline the liminal position of the ULL: while outreach could have been intensified, the results point to the necessity of long-term involvement, beyond the ‘projectisation’ timeline in which ‘short-term logics of investment, accounting, reporting, and assessment are regarded as vital’ (Appadurai 2013: 156). This form of emergent resilience—building collective action amid shifting partnerships—illuminates simultaneously its power as well as its limitations. Institutional resourcefulness enabled rapid implementation through external funding, reuse and flexible roles signalling the organic, generative aspects of resourcefulness fostering a sense of shared purpose. However, these practices remained localised and temporary, dependent on precarious labour and lacking sustained support from high power actors identified in the stakeholder analysis. Rather than ineffective, such efforts can be understood as ‘precedent-setting’ which can encourage further investment from high-power actors (Appadurai 2013). This emergent resilience form consistent of several aspects such as flexible roles and the creation of civic micro-network.

Flexible roles enabled ULL implementation. Management, actors, machinists and the maintenance team handled stage sets, tidied and planted the garden alongside workshop participants (Figure 6); researchers facilitated interdisciplinary translation between all involved, mobilising disciplinary and affective resources. Scoping this resource of role flexibility came, however, with similar limitations of a temporary capacity to sustain it in the absence of a structure of financial and operational support.

Figure 6

Civic micro-networks emerged through guided tours and workshops activating relationships with residents, some becoming co-designers, storytellers or (in)formal guides. The networks generated ‘temporary publics’ (Marres & Rogers 2005), surfacing latent needs and imaginaries. They illustrated how friction and improvisation could become generative and social, and material resources could be mobilised even as they exposed the fragility of resilience-building under inconsistent support.

5.2 IMAGINING AND ENACTING ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

Imagination is increasingly recognised as a pillar of resilience, inscribed in specific social practices of future-making (Karvonen & Van Heur 2014; Appadurai 2013). While anticipated resilience practices generated engagement during the ULL, the endurance to imagine, an emergent resilience form, points toward long-term change.

5.2.1 Enacting futures through civic knowledge and affect

A key ULL outcome was the recognition and integration of everyday, tacit knowledge and community knowledge (Cermeño et al. 2022). During the Recycling & Repurposing Stage Set Workshop, machinists’ memory ties to old stage sets surfaced frictions about preservation and ecological imperatives. ‘They used to make sturdy stage sets back then,’ recounted several of the machinists, asking rhetorically whether the reused plastic bottles in a newer stage set would stand the test of time.

Rather than resolving these frictions through erasure, the workshop team designed modular furniture that preserved inscriptions and marks connecting sets to past performances. These inscriptions became memory prompts during installation and neighbourhood festival, weaving care, memory and sustainability into a shared narrative. While an actor instinctively touched the recycled sets, reading aloud the inscriptions and recounting her memories of the performances, residents enjoyed the new garden and furniture and explored the inscriptions (Figure 7).

Figure 7

Here, the stage set decommissioning procedural constraints became a driver for design. While recycling functioned as an anticipated resilience practice, it also contributed to an emergent resilience form—prefiguring a civic infrastructure of an alternative future—by materialising affective and operational dynamics for sustainable practices. Similarly, the Urban Gardening Workshop facilitated civic knowledge and affect over successive sessions, which gradually strengthened bonds between participants who shared plant cuttings alongside experiences communicating with neighbours and administrators in caring for common green spaces, sending each other photos taken during the workshop, and digging in turns and pairing up to plant the larger shrubs.

Participants accessed specialist knowledge (plant identification, gardening methods), blended with everyday experience and emotional ties: a participant’s ‘makeshift’ propagation method was complemented by the landscape engineer’s variation for increased success, strengthening dialogue and trust.

Material outcomes (the garden and mural) responded to participants’ motivations (see Appendix 4 in the supplemental data online) to contribute to a collective purpose as they revealed deep connections with the vision of the community:

I felt a shiver thinking I could leave something behind for the community, made by my own two hands. We extend nature and green in between the cement blocks, in a beautiful space, the theatre.

(young woman workshop participant)

The workshop thus generated an emergent resilience form by making tangible that shared purpose of a resilient, meaningfully connected community.

The Street Art Workshop further layered creative expression onto community-building. Intergenerational frictions around identity, aesthetics, and public space (e.g. contrasting perspectives on street art’s role in the city) were negotiated through dialogue and collective artistic creation, culminating in painting sessions: experiential events that facilitated the expression of diverse knowledge claims (Rydin 2007) where teens, adults and seniors worked side by side (Figure 8).

Figure 8

Such acts generated ‘participatory infrastructure’ (Irvin & Stansbury 2004): systems of iterated recognition, mutual learning and trust-building beyond one-off consultations. While fragile, such civic and affective infrastructures constitute the social foundation of resilient transition. They do more than cultivate socio-ecologically resilient activities: they render imaginaries real, turning hope into a resource. However, the ULL also showed that affective resources alone cannot sustain long-term change, underscoring the need for structural support.

5.2.2 A collaborative institutional model

Some scholars caution that the overuse of ‘resilience’ risks an uncritical focus on localism that may become apolitical and overly pragmatic (MacKinnon & Derickson 2013: 258; Mason et al. 2012). In contrast, by mobilising the H5 model and its potential to foster the symbiosis between democratic structures and sustainable practices (Carayannis et al. 2021), Masca’s ULL sought to connect socio-ecological resilience practices across local, national and European scales. While Masca’s implementation of anticipated resilience practices aligned with the ETC agenda, low engagement from local administration and other actors revealed the need for alternative modes of institutional imagination. In response, The Dialogue Table emerged as a precedent-setting practice (Appadurai 2013) for experimenting with a collaborative, multiscale institutional model.

The Dialogue Table is a transdisciplinary collaboration method that brings stakeholders in a less formal, non-administrative setting, encouraging them to reimagine their roles on an equal footing when defining problems and finding solutions. By suspending hierarchical norms, the method stimulates knowledge and solution co-production beyond rigid institutional frameworks (Drăghici 2022).

At Masca, The Dialogue Table convened 17 participants: nine local administration representatives, key theatre staff, the article’s authors, invited experts and a moderator. PMB and PS6 participants were selected based on their potential for overlapping interests and their institutional capacity to enact change.

The event began with a sensory walk through the garden and theatre, inviting participants to engage through sight, smell and touch, while learning about Masca’s history and emerging vision. This ‘in situ corporeal experience’ (Degen & Rose 2012: 3273) rendered abstract challenges tangible and grounded discussion in shared sensory experience.

Following the walk, participants gathered in the theatre’s rehearsal room, where a two-screen video installation documented the ULL workshops (Figure 9). These visual prompts sustained the presence of alternative futures as discussions unfolded around institutional alignment and collaboration. While participants acknowledged familiar obstacles (institutional inertia, fragmented communication, political contradictions), they also articulated potential solutions. Shared concern over environmental issues, for instance, led to spontaneous suggested proposals for collaboration between the theatre and the PMB Department for Social Work, extending to possible links with the business sector.

Figure 9

The performative setting enabled participants to move from the ‘what is’ to ‘what could be’, prefiguring how shared governance might operate and feel. Through this, Masca engaged in a ‘politics of show-and-tell’ that can create a ‘border zone of trial and error, a sort of research and development space’ where ‘activists [and] bureaucrats can explore new designs for partnerships’ (Appadurai 2013: 11) and thus stretch the rigid boundaries of public cultural institutions.

The constraints on this practice became evident in the aftermath. Romania’s regulatory and financial frameworks offered limited space for institutional learning and the momentum generated by The Dialogue Table did not translate into prompt concrete support or structural change. Echoing Appadurai’s (2013: 20) warning, such exercises in democratic practice are not ‘automatically reproductive’, including instead ‘contingencies such as leadership, morale, flexibility, and material enablement’ that require that attention is given to the forms of resilience that emerge within such contingencies and provide opportunities to address and initiate the necessary structural changes.

Post-event debriefings with the interim director highlighted the need for systemic measures to embed the imaginative work the ULL enabled, such as changing of the ROF or participatory activities integration in regular planning, stakeholder collaboration and multiscale connections, together with potential benefits (increased resilience, transferable model of collaboration and resource use that could be adopted by other cultural institutions) and risks (increased costs and timelines in the absence of streamlined processes) (Table 2).

Table 2

Systemic changes needed and risks.

PROBLEM	MEASURES	POTENTIAL RISK/UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Masca’s Organisational and Operational Regulations’ (ROF) restrictive scope inhibits collaborations, building trust, developing social impact, etc.	PMB approval to modify ROF to include community development and sustainable transition activities General Municipality of Bucharest (PMB) and District 6 Municipality (PS6) collaboration to allow a budgetary increase to serve both the local and city-wide public Formal integration of community-focused roles, e.g. community facilitators to support an expanded scope, could be achieved either by renaming and expanding the Communication & Marketing Service into Communication, Marketing & Community Engagement, or by establishing a new unit, ‘Community Projects & Mediation’, under the Artistic Department	Strengthening Masca’s institutional resilience amid PMB and PS6 political rupture Integrating the practice connecting artistic creation and community life into Masca’s core operations, ensuring both continuity of engagement and eligibility for participatory cultural grants within the local and European Union funding frameworks If not streamlined, PMB–PS6 collaboration for budgetary increase could lead to ineffective timelines
Lack of an iterative participatory process	Ongoing urban living labs (ULLs) with an action-research cycle: observe → reflect → plan → act → observe again (feedbacking culture)	Bolstering a transferable collaborative model that offers long-term understanding of social dynamics and nimble-yet-inclusive problem-solving In view of the polarised Romanian context, the initial phases of implementing such ULLs may give rise to highly charged settings
Masca’s limited involvement in the local community	Develop and integrate regular participatory activities in the theatre’s strategy Review and adapt according to community feedback and through community participation	More representative design of initiatives addressing community needs Sustaining strengthened and engaged, thus more resilient, communities Expanding the scope of the theatre may run the risk of alienating the existing public. However, the ULL’s preliminary findings did not show this to be the case as the public attracted by Masca’s ‘alternative’ approach to theatre plays shared many of the values embodied by this new vision to address community needs. The physical layout also helps in this sense, as the building and garden offer flexible spaces, lending themselves to multifunctional use

Without multilevel policy alignment (including access to European Union recovery plans funding or the European Commission’s Net Zero Cities platform—M100), or formal recognition of public theatres as infrastructures for socio-ecological learning, such initiatives remain difficult to institutionalise (NEB Compass 2023). Comparable European cases demonstrate that the public theatres’ capacity to function as civic laboratories for sustainability depends on municipal support, cross-sectoral partnerships and regulatory flexibility (Cermeño et al. 2022; Petrescu & Petcou 2023).

Masca exemplifies a key tension within the H5 model: while public institutions can act as connective infrastructures, they often lack the internal capacity, legal autonomy or cross-sectoral coordination to sustain innovation. To realise its full potential as a green cultural infrastructure, Masca requires not only symbolic alignment with European values (e.g. New European Bauhaus, ETC), but also concrete institutional reforms, new professional roles (e.g. community facilitators, cultural ecologists), and integration into territorial strategies for resilience and ecological transition.