Building Belonging Infrastructure in Cities
Where people and creativity thrive together
Belonging is a critical human need for everybody.
The future of cities is centered around belonging.
To grow belonging, people need power and
agency over their own lives and communities.
Organizing repeated, intergenerational, arts and culture community gatherings, dialogue, and actions—with youth leadership—lights the path forward.
Arts and Culture
Arts and culture creates space to cultivate belonging. A critical role of a city is to gather us together to nourish the deepest parts of ourselves. The opportunity to spend time together in sacred exploration and playfulness with other humans is the gift our cities offer.
Local
A city flourishes with unique qualities shaped by the people who live in it by centering belonging for all people through layers of arts and culture gatherings, processes, and activities.
Intergenerational
Today, we are being called to co-create our cities intergenerationally, with youth (13–24) in facilitation and leadership roles to explore new ways of belonging to ourselves, each other, and the planet.
A city is a complicated place where people organize themselves to live. At the root of all organizational activity is a story. The power of storytelling shapes a city’s vision—its processes, the resources it invests in, and how things are built. Urban planning resides
in the space between today’s reality and the imagined future.
This in-between space is city-making—
from fiction to nonfiction.
Belonging in Cities 