You define your concept of “placework” as the “dynamic, reciprocal work that everyday places do for and with individuals and communities, enabling us to grow into being ourselves, and enabling us to be together.” Can you elaborate on these two distinct but interconnected functions - how places help us 'become ourselves' while simultaneously fostering the conditions for meaningful community connections?

In the book, I identify two kinds of placework that everyday places can do for us – helping us to become ourselves, and helping us to be with others, perhaps even to become communities. Both of these kinds of placework are crucial, and it was important to explore them both in the book. Here I want to focus on the first kind of placework, which is sometimes overlooked. While we sometimes acknowledge the importance of public space for building community – though our planning doesn't always act on it – we don’t often acknowledge how important everyday public places can be for our sense of self. People I interviewed in Brooklyn, New York and Oakland, California – who I call my “tour guides” – often talked about how some of the most unlikely everyday places were central to developing their own value systems. For example, a particularly welcoming supermarket might help them define the ethos by which they wanted to live. Many peoples’ tours also involved taking me to places where they felt they could be free, that gave them a space of respite, and, in doing so, contributed significantly to their sense of self and belonging.

In your research across New York City and Oakland, were there particular spaces that stood out as crucial for nurturing relationships between generations? How did these spaces help to strengthen the community?

Some of the most crucial intergenerational spaces were diners, donut shops, and even some fast food restaurants, though of course libraries, parks and other public spaces also played important roles. The particular places that people took me to all had a few things in common: first, they were places where people could sit for a while, and when there was food to be bought, it was relatively inexpensive. Another key commonality were staff who engaged in conversation with everyone, and in so doing encouraged relationships between generations. These people played what I call in the book the role of the “facilitator” (though their actual job titles were usually librarian, waiter or park worker) as they helped connect people who might otherwise have had very little reason to chat with each other. Sometimes these important facilitators actively involved strangers in conversation, and at other times their work was less direct, setting a tone of the place that made people feel free to chat with people they didn’t know.

You capture how seemingly trivial daily encounters in public spaces with people we don't know creates a subtle but vital social fabric that helps to validate us as humans. As cities become increasingly digitised and 'efficient,' how can we protect these small but meaningful moments of human connection that make urban life rich and worthwhile?

An important start in protecting these moments of human connection is acknowledging that they're actually important – not something nice to have, but vital. And if we start to believe that this is important, it should influence how we vote and what we prioritise in local governance, especially regarding development and commercial and residential rent control. At the same time, there are individual actions we can take – if there are places we want to keep, we have to act accordingly. We have to spend money with local businesses and we need to advocate for them.

Part of avoiding the hollowing out of everyday places is a need to think, and act, critically about digital “efficiencies.” Very often digital solutions can look seamless, but they can actually mask abusive labour practices. In the public realm, many digital efficiencies are really corporate money grabs from contingent workers and the small businesses that do our necessary placework. For example, in the United States, many delivery apps - which seem to simplify ordering food from home – take a huge commission from small restaurants with already tight profit margins, and pay delivery workers poorly, while forcing an inhuman pace of deliveries that endangers the safety of delivery people and pedestrians.

Images from the book "The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places", (MIT Press, 2024). Image credits: Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

With ageing populations becoming a more significant part of urban life, what role do you think community spaces play in combatting loneliness and ageism? And how can cities design for these needs?

As we age, work, commuting, and caregiving often take up less of our time, reducing the opportunities for everyday connections and the casual interactions that help people feel less alone. For younger people, work or school are important places for interaction, but very often gather people who are largely of a similar age or time of life. All of this leaves us with generationally-segregated lives.

In this gap, public and semi-public places that do placework have the potential to connect people across generations who have no other reason to know each other - which is important for anyone, at any age. Among the many benefits, younger people gain a depth of knowledge of a place or neighbourhood through older people, and older people feel less isolated, less alone. When people are connecting with each other and actively contributing to the here and now, the experience of ongoing learning is vitally sustaining.

For cities, ensuring that these places exist, and ensuring that these kinds of interactions happen, will require a variety of policy and design solutions. First, we must recognise where placework already happens, and protect those places. We should also design and build new spaces that support connection, by building on community groups’ own knowledge of their neighbourhoods and needs. Additionally, we must take seriously the role of public facilitators by investing in people to foster these connections, creating jobs that recognise and value the fact that people are infrastructure as much as our built environment.

You emphasise how cities are not just where we live—they're living systems meant to help everyone thrive, prosper and connect, yet few policies reflect this understanding. How can we fundamentally shift planning and policy to value and design spaces for people rather than capital, and what specific changes are essential to achieve this transformation?

To shift planning and policy toward making spaces for people first requires a shift in thinking, and an acknowledgement that people and their well-being must be the top priority for cities, and ultimately the bottom line. You can’t have profit and well-being as a double bottom line for cities; when it comes down to it, you will always have to prioritise one over the other. If well-being were truly the bottom line, cities would not protect developers’ profits over peoples’ abilities to stay in their homes, and would take steps to alleviate and address the discriminatory wrongs of the past. Cities would prioritise building real permanent affordable housing, creating parks and open space, investing in libraries, and other free places where people can gather, and so much more.

We can reimagine urban governance so that it prioritises inclusion, equity and sustainability, understanding that people have a “right to the city” – the right to an ecosystem of housing, leisure, food, health, transit, jobs, education and more. Mexico City is a good example, having recently embedded and operationalised the “right to the city” in its City Charter and Constitution. This guarantees equity in the public goods, promotes social inclusion, and upholds human rights as central to city life.

To create cities that prioritise wellbeing also requires changing the planning process and the way we educate planners. We need to shift the planning process so that it always integrates robust research about people’s needs and connections to place. Does this mean training planners to become anthropologists or environmental psychologists or photographers? No. Instead, we have to start by teaching planners and architects how to collaborate with the many disciplines that understand people and place. We need to cultivate listening, respect, and shared language for collaboration, building the possibility for real and transformative dialogue, just as we hope to do in the everyday places that create the cities we need.

Book spreads from  "The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places", (MIT Press, 2024). Image credits: Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani