For the last decade, the call for more housing has grown louder in American communities large and small. Rents and home prices have climbed, mortgage rates have increased, while building has slowed, the shortage has become an urgent priority for city halls, statehouses and even the federal government. In July, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law — a bipartisan effort to invest, cut red tape and spur a new generation of homes across the nation.

We applaud this momentum, as any progress on housing is good news for cities and towns. But the push to create new housing has not been matched by a push to create the conditions for thriving communities — places where people have homes, yes, but where they also know their neighbors and experience a high quality of life.

Some of the clearest evidence of that gap comes from the people who know mixed-income housing best. After more than a decade of research, Case Western Reserve University’s National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities found that housing investment alone was not enough to foster inclusion or connection. “Without intentional social weaving and capacity-building efforts,” the research team concluded, “residents remain socially isolated and economically disconnected.” So the initiative changed course, relaunching with belonging and economic mobility at the center of the work.

The same thing is happening in cities and towns across the country. Far too often, new housing (whether market-rate or affordable) provides people a place to live and little more. Yet it’s the civic infrastructure — the parks, libraries, trails, community centers and main streets we share — that turns a place to live into a true community.

A home is necessary for health and well-being. But it is not sufficient for a joyful life — one where you feel connected and feel you belong.

Civic Infrastructure Lowers the Cost of Living and Supports Economic Mobility

There’s an economic case, too. We urgently need more affordable housing, but an affordable home doesn’t guarantee an affordable life. The civic commons helps close that gap by lowering the cost of living. It can offer a free play space for growing kids, a public pool where they can learn to swim, a library offering technology for creators and support for small businesses, a park where you can exercise without a gym membership, a greenway that lets you walk or bike to work or the store instead of driving, and a community center where teens and elders alike can pursue their passions.

Shared spaces can also shape where a child ends up in life. Economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues studied 21 billion friendships among 72.2 million Americans. They found that “economic connectedness,” meaning how many friends lower-income people have who are higher-income, is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility. In fact, the researchers estimate that if low-income children grew up in places as economically connected as those where higher-income children typically grow up, their adult incomes would rise by about 20%.

At the same time, a mounting body of research points to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income. A Stanford study showed that since 1970, the share of families living in neighborhoods of either concentrated poverty or concentrated wealth has more than doubled. This economic segregation does not just hold back low income children economically — a Chicago study showed that it can hold back an entire regional economy.

But living side-by-side in and of itself does not create those connections. The researchers found that two things matter: whether people of different incomes cross paths, and whether they actually connect when they do.

That’s where housing and the civic commons work together. Parks, libraries, rec centers and main streets built near new housing give people easy reasons to meet and interact. Housing can put neighbors close to one another; a robust civic commons helps turn that proximity into connection.

That’s why wherever we build new housing, we should build civic infrastructure right alongside it. A connected network of public spaces is what delivers quality of life over the long haul.

This is a generational opportunity. We can build enough housing in ways that increase affordability and, at the same time, turn those homes into real communities. Every every city, town or agency funding or building housing should intentionally co-invest in civic infrastructure.

What Civic Infrastructure Can Do Beyond Making Life More Affordable

When we invest with intention, the network of shared spaces in our neighborhoods does many things for people and communities. It also delivers:

Health and well-being. Parks, trails and recreation centers make it easier to move, get outside and ease the stress of daily life. This contributes to better physical and mental health.

Thriving local business. Active public spaces draw foot traffic, support small businesses and signal that a neighborhood is worth investing in.

Public safety. Well-used, well-cared-for places put more eyes on the street and increase the perception of safety in a neighborhood — which in turn contributes to measurable reductions in crime.

Sustainability and resilience. Natural areas and green spaces help communities adapt to a changing climate. They capture stormwater to reduce flooding, and their trees clean the air and water and cool neighborhoods.

Where Belonging Takes Root

The evidence that high quality shared space shapes community life goes back decades.

In Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, once one of the largest public housing developments in the country, researchers compared courtyards and common areas with more trees and greenery to those that were bare. Residents near the greener spaces used them more, knew more of their neighbors and reported feeling safer. The buildings themselves were otherwise identical. The difference was the shared space outside the door.

The pattern holds in new housing, too. Researcher Jacinta Francis and colleagues studied 911 residents of new housing developments in Perth, Australia, and found that high-quality public spaces were associated with a stronger sense of community. It wasn’t simply how often people used those spaces that mattered — it was the quality.

We’ve seen the same in Civic Commons cities. In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, where investment in a new park and greenway came alongside renovated homes, neighbors are spending more time together. The share of residents who socialize with neighbors at least once a week rose 12 percentage points, to 69%, and the share of residents who trust their neighbors rose from 13% to 34%. In Akron, connected investments — the Main Street Complete Streets project, the renovation of Lock 3 park and regular programming by the Downtown Akron Partnership — have helped attract 60% more residents downtown and 600 new housing units. Public space came first. People, housing and a more vibrant neighborhood followed.

Advice for the Field

So how do we build homes that become communities? Here are six ways funders, developers and public leaders can ensure their housing strategies deliver genuine communities and quality of life, not just more units.

1. Co-invest in housing and the civic infrastructure around it

When resources are tight, it’s easy to spend every dollar on units alone. Instead, set aside a portion of housing funding for the parks, libraries and main streets around new homes. The Community Development Block Grant is one of the most flexible federal funding streams and can be used to support civic infrastructure — it’s worth a fresh look with that in mind. The recently proposed In Real Life Act, which calls for new investment in shared public spaces, could also open a new source of federal support for this work.

2. Pair housing and the civic commons in the same funding tool

The Atlanta BeltLine uses a Tax Allocation District to pay for trails, parks and affordable housing together. As trail and park investments raise property values, the city dedicates 15% of that district’s revenue to an affordable housing trust fund for the same corridor. This structure provides an opportunity for public space amenities and affordability to grow together.

3. Invest in the public realm before new housing arrives

Sequencing matters. In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, investment in the public realm came early. This approach is especially powerful in communities that have faced disinvestment: longtime residents benefit right away, and when new neighbors move in, there’s a place to help them feel a sense of belonging. This work builds much needed trust in local governments at a time when it is sorely needed; trust which local governments will need to increase housing production in the future.

4. Build new housing where strong civic infrastructure already exists

Some neighborhoods already have great public space waiting for more people to enjoy it. Prioritizing housing there — as in downtown Akron, or along Memphis’ riverfront — gets more out of investments communities have already made, as opposed to prioritizing housing through greenfield development. Office-to-residential conversions are one way to bring new neighbors to these places.

5. Design the civic commons in from the start

Where housing is planned or under way, look for opportunities to add civic infrastructure — or bring housing into your civic commons efforts. Seattle’s Yesler Terrace was redeveloped with parks, gardens and shared space designed from day one, and by 2016 resident surveys showed a significant increase in the number of residents who regularly engaged with their neighbors. In Chicago, the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Housing Authority built three new branch libraries with mixed-income housing on the floors above. This strategy works in smaller communities, too. The Trust for Public Land’s Parks & Affordable Housing Guidebook offers successful examples of smaller communities that have paired housing with civic infrastructure, including Bozeman, Mont., Greenville, S.C. and Macon, Ga.

Co-designing housing and civic infrastructure can encourage neighbors who may resist density to see the immediate value of more housing in their community — it is a pathway for delivering new community assets along with new units.

6. Use economic development dollars for civic infrastructure

Cities spend heavily on tax incentives to lure businesses. Research from Brookings suggests investing in civic infrastructure can be a more effective path to economic growth than subsidizing business relocation or other traditional economic development tactics. Quality of place and quality of life are key drivers for local economies. Great public space attracts residents, and residents attract jobs.

Building for the Next 100 Years

The homes we build in the next decade will shape American life for generations.

If we build only housing, we risk creating neighborhoods where people live side by side but never really meet — where a new apartment is affordable but a good life is still out of reach. If we build housing and the civic commons together, we create something more lasting: neighborhoods and towns where people are healthy, connected and feel a sense of belonging.

The country has decided it needs more housing. Let’s make sure it gets something along with those homes: genuine communities.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

Beyond Housing: What It Takes to Build Genuine Communities was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For more than half a century, researchers have been tracking the ways Americans have grown apart. Only 20% of us regularly spend time with our neighbors, a third of us don’t interact with them at all, and face-to-face socializing has dropped across every demographic group since 2003. We have sorted ourselves by income: the share of families living in mostly affluent or mostly low-income neighborhoods has doubled since 1970, making it ever less likely that we cross paths with people whose lives look different from our own. And we have stopped trusting one another. In 1972, 46% of Americans said “most people can be trusted,” by 2024, only 25% did.

These trends have taken their toll. Isolation is harming Americans’ health and well-being, economic segregation is limiting children’s future economic mobility, and distrust leaves our communities and our country less able to solve the problems we face together.

Ten years ago, five foundations asked whether investing in parks, libraries, trails and community centers could help reverse these trends. A decade later, the answer from Reimagining the Civic Commons cities is clear. Our teams have seeded a different future, one in which neighbors interact more, people connect across divides and trust is taking root. By investing strategically in networks of civic assets, they have turned them into what they were always meant to be: public space for the common good, where neighbors meet and trust grows. In vastly different cities across the country, they are building stronger, more connected communities.

Here’s what a decade of that work has taught us about how to do this across communities large and small.

Build things people can see and enjoy

Trust and connection are hard to see. A restored lake or a busy riverfront park is not. When people can see and use real improvements in their own neighborhood, they start to believe in what public investment can do.

In Lexington, Kentucky, a portfolio approach to several linked public spaces has energized downtown and inspired a citywide culture of connection. It began in 2022 with the opening of Town Branch Commons, a high-quality linear park running through the urban core. Next came the redesign of historic Charles Young Park in the East End, which added a new playground and a playful water feature shaped by community input. Gatton Park rose from a sea of surface parking to anchor the west end of downtown along the Town Branch trail. And Phoenix Park, once an underused, unwelcoming space, became a vibrant, family-friendly hotspot right next to the Central Library, where visits have risen 45% since the park’s transformation. Together, these connected spaces have brought new energy to downtown Lexington and built support for public space policies that will shape the city for decades to come.

Macon, Georgia, shows what can happen when car-centric, inaccessible space is turned into vibrant, people-first civic infrastructure. When Interstate 75 was built through the historically Black neighborhood of Pleasant Hill, it wiped out the community’s commercial core and reduced its population by more than half, leaving the neighborhood under-resourced and neglected for decades. The Macon Civic Commons team has taken a community-led approach to restoring and enhancing the neighborhood’s public realm.

Sheftall Legacy Park turned a sliver of unused land beside the interstate into a neighborhood amenity, with fitness equipment and an upgraded basketball court added with resident input. Bike Walk Macon’s public rides and Open Streets events show how the city’s roads can serve as connective tissue for pedestrians and bicyclists, not just cars. These efforts are building optimism and an appetite for more: 91% of Pleasant Hill Open Streets participants support more government spending on public spaces, and 80% of parkgoers believe Pleasant Hill will improve a lot in the next few years. Along the way, the work has created a growing network of community champions.

Visible, everyday wins like these do more than improve a neighborhood. They show residents what public investment can do, and they build the support that makes the next project possible.

Measure what matters

Most civic assets measure only the basics of their operations: number of visitors, acres mowed, books in circulation. Those numbers have their uses, but they do not tell us whether a place is making a difference in people’s lives. We have learned to ask better questions. Do people meet someone new? Do they talk with their neighbors? Do they trust each other, and their local government, more?

In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, where a new park, a greenway and a redesigned commercial corridor were co-created with residents, those questions produced striking answers. Eighty-two percent of people in the neighborhood’s public spaces met someone new, and the share of residents who say most people can be trusted rose from 13% to 34%. Nearly everyone (94%) says the neighborhood has changed for the better, and 97% feel hopeful about its future.

In Akron, work led by the Civic Commons team in partnership with residents has inspired similar optimism. About three-quarters of Ohio & Erie Canal Park residents say their neighborhood has changed for the better in recent years. Summit Lake now offers fishing, kayaking, gardening and public events, all designed with residents from the start. Neighbors there report socializing more often, up 22 percentage points, and trust in local institutions has risen 28 percentage points. Ninety-four percent of visitors believe Summit Lake has a bright future, a notable outlook for a neighborhood that has faced decades of hardship.

Numbers like these capture far more than attendance figures can, and they help build the political will for further investment.

Local, cross-sector teams get results

Trust, social connection and resilience are not outcomes that any single park, trail, library or community center can deliver on its own. They emerge from a network of places designed and managed to achieve them, driven by people and institutions working toward shared goals. Delivering the common good takes partners from every sector: public, private, nonprofit and philanthropic. Each Reimagining the Civic Commons team built partnerships around the challenges and opportunities prevalent in each community and worked across silos to reach their goals.

In San José, reviving the Guadalupe River meant solving problems no public agency could tackle alone. The city paired a 2024 policy to clear unhoused encampments along the river trail with interim housing, housing assistance and wraparound services for the hundreds of people living there, plus a “cash for trash” program that paid residents and volunteers to clean up. City staff and volunteers put in tens of thousands of hours to clean spaces, and upgraded maintenance and new programming at Arena Green, from yoga to a sports equipment library, gave people reasons to come back. The river is now recovering: native salmon have returned, a new kayak tour drew more than 100 people to its banks on its first outing and trail visits are up 20% year over year.

On Cincinnati’s west side, steep terrain, highways and rail lines have cut neighborhoods off from Mill Creek, and from each other, for decades. The Civic Commons team is reconnecting them with a six-mile greenway along the creek and an unused railroad corridor as a strategy for equitable redevelopment.

From the beginning, it was clear that no single organization could do it alone. That’s why the work has brought together a diverse group ranging from the nonprofit Tri-State Trails, Mill Creek Alliance, The Port (Cincinnati’s redevelopment agency), community development organizations, local parks and recreation departments working alongside residents.

Even before the corridor purchase is final, the partners have opened a new creek access point, a pocket park and the city’s first kayak rental kiosk. Events like Meet the Candidates bike rides have put residents and decision-makers side by side. Today, more than 80% of neighborhood residents surveyed believe the trail will help their neighborhoods, and 81% support more funding for public spaces.

The partners in Cincinnati and San José share similar approaches to working in coalitions: agreeing on what they want to achieve, pooling resources to get there and working across organizational silos to get it done.

Every community needs public space for the common good

A decade of work in cities across America has shown that communities that invest in public space with intention can connect people, rebuild trust and strengthen local economies, and we have the data to prove it. Parks, libraries, trails and community centers belong to all of us, and they are free and open to everyone. When they are managed as a connected portfolio, focused on outcomes that matter and guided by cross-sector teams, they can deliver what communities need most: connection, shared prosperity, resilience, trust and a healthier democracy.

Read more about what our cities have achieved in our 10-year report, A Decade of Change: Public Space for the Common Good.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

Where Americans Come Together was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Bridget Marquis

Editors note: This article is republished with permission from the American Planning Association, which holds the copyright to this content. “Beyond the Ban: Designing the Third Spaces Teens Need” was published in Planning.

Across the country, schools and states are restricting student cellphone use and grappling with the influence of social media and artificial intelligence (AI), as parents, school officials, and lawmakers worry about phones’ negative impacts to learning, mental health, and real-world relationships.

But reducing access to technology addresses only half the equation. If communities reduce technology use without investing in compelling alternatives, particularly third spaces, they’re treating a symptom, not the problem.

Smartphones deliver dopamine-producing novelty and stimulation, which are important for young people — and they provide a sense of autonomy and independence from adults. They also allow teens to meet a deeper, developmentally appropriate need for social belonging and identity formation. The problem is not the impulse — it is the absence of other compelling ways to meet those needs.

The good news is our civic infrastructure — parks, libraries, trails, commercial districts, community centers, and other civic infrastructure — can be intentionally designed and operated to provide real-world connection to peers, places for enjoyable physical movement, and moments of joy and delight, which research shows help buffer against mental health challenges.

Real places that compete

If phones deliver dopamine, autonomy, and easy social connection, public space needs to deliver those same three things, while becoming a place where teens can build a sense of belonging and identity that give those daily habits meaning.

One example is the Anna C. Verna Playground at FDR Park in Philadelphia. Opened in 2023, its centerpiece is the largest swing set in North America — a giant oval ring with 30 inward-facing swings, alongside seven slides of increasing height and speed, climbable steel-and-rope birdhouse structures, and climbing logs.

The design works for teens as much as for young children. The 30-foot slide and giant swing set signal that this is a place for real physical risk, not just toddler play. Open, accessible environments avoid the “children only” cues that push teens away, while natural materials and a muted palette stand in for the primary-color plastic aimed squarely at kids. Different ages can share the same features without being segregated into separate zones, and basic comforts like bathrooms, seating, and transit accessibility make it a place where teens can get to and stay at.

The early results have shown teens cluster in groups, take physical risks, and use playground equipment in their own ways — climbing higher, swinging harder, turning the megaswing into a shared, negotiated experience.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tennessee, the Sunset Skate — a recurring roller-skating night in Tom Lee Park — has drawn in young people by leaning into teen culture rather than just tolerating it. Two of this year’s themed, DJ-hosted nights, “Jersey Jams” and “Back2School,” were built to attract teens.

The programming is so compelling that teens are promoting it themselves. As one teen skater from the group 901sk8.youth posted on Instagram, “It’s a safe place where teens can have fun, meet new people, and work out your legs … [and] it gives us a positive space to be active, build friendships, and also bring new people into the roller-skating community.”

Strategies to consider

Far too few communities think strategically about how public spaces can attract and retain young people’s interest. Park playgrounds are designed to appeal to small children, even though more than half of playground users are teens and adults. Commercial districts and streets often restrict teens from gathering in groups or doing activities like skateboarding and biking.

Teens already are telling us what they need. Crisis Text Line and Common Good Labs analyzed thousands of anonymized conversations between adolescents and mental health counselors to identify the resources teens turn to when coping with mental health challenges. High-quality public space is uniquely positioned to deliver all but one of the top six responses: opportunities for social connections, making and performing art, playing sports and exercising, books, spending time in nature, and clinical mental health services.

Alexandra Lange’s The Design of Childhood showed that the built environment is not neutral — it actively promotes or inhibits kids’ independence and social development. Planners should consider these guidelines when creating space that will deliver what teens need.

Build for cooperation, not just capacity

FDR Park’s mega swing set encourages multiple users to work together. Research from the U.K. shows this format especially draws teen girls, which is a demographic public space design often fails. Prioritizing equipment and features that create shared, negotiated experiences over solo-use amenities can help.

Prioritize independent access

Teens may not go somewhere if a parent must drive them. Ensuring teen spaces are accessible via walking, biking, micromobility, and transit (like FDR Park in Philadelphia) should be a core design requirement, not an afterthought. This isn’t just a mobility issue; it is an equity and participation issue.

Cater to teens’ interests, not generic recreation

A Baltimore study found that teens who developed a “passion project” and built community around it saw significantly better long-term life outcomes, evidence that space supporting a specific pursuit does more for teens than open-ended, unprogrammed recreation. That means designing spaces that can easily support teen hobbies and interests — maker areas, performance space, skate- or sports-adjacent terrain.

Talk about what stakeholders already prioritize

Planners can position teen-focused public space as the necessary complement to efforts that build social connection, strengthen school achievement, and improve public health. In Akron, Ohio, the Summit Lake Ambassadors program is a summer initiative that hires young people to care for the places they care about by picking up trash, planting flowers, and mulching garden beds. Making the case with data — like youth mental health research and life-outcomes evidence — can also strengthen the argument for gathering spaces designed for teens.

Collaborate with the community to build buy-in

Anticipate and address concerns about unsupervised teens — noise, safety, loitering — with accessibility and ownership models. The #TouchGrassPhilly program is one example. A paid youth influencer initiative from Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, it employs young creators to explore the city’s more than 10,000 acres of parkland, produce social media content, and co-host community events, including “Teen Takeover” nights at a local park.

Create cross-department teams

Public space touches many parts of local government, including planning, parks and recreation, transportation, public safety, and public health. Coordinating across those departments can help move it up the priority list in city budgets. That investment shouldn’t stop at capital projects; it should also fund the everyday operations and maintenance that keep these spaces welcoming to people of all ages.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

Beyond the Ban: Designing the Third Spaces Teens Need was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Eamon O’Connor

Greeting a neighbor on the street. Playing a pick-up basketball game at your neighborhood court. Throwing pottery in a community center. In isolation, each of these activities makes these public spaces a little brighter and buzzier. Taken together, these moments accumulate into something bigger: social infrastructure, or the physical spaces that shape our capacity to interact.

The term social infrastructure is helpful not just because it signals the “social” factors we care about: the interactions and civic outcomes that these spaces foster. “Infrastructure” is just as, if not more, important as the “social” part of the term. It signals the systemic nature of these spaces. They hold immense power that requires — but rarely receives — the intention and resources devoted to more traditional infrastructure, such as energy, heavy rail and telecom.

Why should the power of social infrastructure command the same attention we give to power grids and rail lines? Because the stakes are just as high. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared lacking social connection a public health crisis and proposed reinvesting in social infrastructure as the first recommendation to address it. But the benefits go beyond individual health: neighborhoods with strong social ties recover faster from disasters: during Chicago’s deadly 1995 heat wave, residents of neighborhoods with active sidewalks, shops and gathering places were far more likely to survive, because someone knew to knock on their door. Research by economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that friendships across class lines are among the strongest predictors of a child’s future economic mobility, and that the places where people meet shape whether those friendships form. Connections between neighbors underpin public health, civic participation, public safety and the economic well-being of residents, and social infrastructure sites are where much of that connection starts.

Yet we rarely measure how well our public spaces are performing in connecting people to each other in ways that create social and economic benefit. Without that evidence, it’s much harder to make the case for investments in public spaces.

New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and Gehl’s recent study sets out to fill this gap. It finds that the social interactions we care about are most present in communities that are not just physically well-connected, but well-supported by the web of municipal departments and stewardship organizations required to make them hum. In short, connected people need connected places, which in turn need connected governance.

With support from U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand’s offices and funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the study is one of the most comprehensive to date on the social impacts and success drivers of social infrastructure. With a focus on three New York State communities — Poughkeepsie and New York City’s Lower East Side and Flatbush neighborhoods — our work may appear particular to the contexts of a global capital and a post-industrial Hudson Valley city. The lessons they bring, however, hold relevance for a variety of communities across the country.

The buzzing street life of Flatbush will be familiar to any community with a Main Street shaped by generations of immigrant businesses. The anchor sites of the Lower East Side reflect the national wave of investment in civic buildings in the early 20th century, powered by New Deal era policies and Gilded Age wealth. And the patchwork of public space investments in Poughkeepsie — a city seeking to reverse industrial decline and divisive road infrastructure — evokes the comeback-in-progress of so many small and mid-sized cities nationwide.

Understanding the social life and social infrastructure of these communities required a mixed-method approach. An intercept survey of over 1,100 visitors to 21 public indoor and outdoor spaces revealed the mix of social interactions that take place there. An observational study of 3,000 people took stock of the ebb, flow, and mix of activity in parks, libraries, streets, and community centers. Deeper engagement — community photo walks, focus groups, nearly 100 interviews — helped surface the particular design, programmatic and operational factors that make or break a social infrastructure site. Altogether, the team triangulated what we learned across methods to reveal core findings about the life and space of social infrastructure.

Social infrastructure fosters the range of social connections people need for their well-being.

Calling on public spaces to be the savior for our crisis of social connection can seem like a tall order. Can we really expect library and park-goers to become fast friends just because they’re sharing the same space? Maybe with time — but the key is understanding that friendship is not the only goal. Indeed, many studies are showing the value not just in the harder-to-attain bridging social capital that Robert Putnam preached, but in the weak ties — the casual encounters and loose acquaintances in our orbit — that keep us connected to community. Extensive research has demonstrated these ties’ critical importance in bridging differences, accessing economic opportunities, and fostering innovation outside of people’s immediate network.

Our study found that these spaces — from parks to libraries — foster a range of types of social connection: from being familiar with others, to building relationships, to creating community. For example, more than 70% of survey respondents reported recognizing someone else in the space. More than 40% reported engaging in an activity with others. Farther along on the spectrum, respondents also started to make friends (more than 35%) and reported feeling less lonely or isolated (more than 60%). And in the “deep end,” respondents reported interacting across race (more than 50%) and class (more than 35%), and feeling trust in others there (more than 70%). At a time when stories of isolation and polarization are plastered across the headlines, these spaces tell a different story. Social connection in all its forms is alive and well for people in the places that bring us together.

Social infrastructure works best in a well-connected network of high-quality spaces.

Not all social infrastructure is created equal. Gaps in access and quality define many of our cities, often hitting lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color the hardest. The study revealed as much, demonstrating gaps in social infrastructure in each community — and how the social life of a neighborhood reflects the best and worst of its physical form.

For example, the Lower East Side saw high levels of social connection across the spectrum: people engaged in activities with others, made friends, felt less lonely, felt they belonged, bridged race, and trusted others at especially high rates. This neighborhood is defined by a diverse mix of sites connected by a walkable grid: a park, library, community center, and open street occupy the same 5-minute walking radius, connected to one another by pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and crossings. With a high-quality physical network of spaces, the neighborhood sees strong social connections across the board.

By contrast, the Flatbush neighborhood — defined by a buzzing commercial corridor and a persistent lack of more formal public gathering spots — saw more “shallow” social connection. People reported recognizing others at extremely high rates (a whopping 84%), but had comparatively low rates of engaging in activities (41%) and gathering with others (49%). It’s not for lack of trying. One in five people observed spending time on Flatbush Avenue brought their own seats to the sidewalk because there were few other options to sit on their neighborhood main street. The milk crates and folding chairs add to the local flavor, but are also symptoms of disinvestment: there are few seats, trees, and shaded areas to linger on Flatbush Ave, even at busy bus stops.

If the study finds Flatbush is a place of casual connection without intentional gathering, Poughkeepsie may be the opposite. A mix of gathering spaces — renovated neighborhood parks, a vast community center, a beloved library — each draw groups of friends and family. 81% of people reported gathering with friends, family, and acquaintances at these sites. But opportunities for casual social encounter suffer — a comparatively small third of respondents make new friends at these sites, 56% recognize others, 23% report bridging across class divides, and 56% report trusting others. Basic mobility challenges — a long walk across two major arterials to reach the community center from the high school, for example — drive atomized, car-centric behavior that limits informal social connection. The social infrastructure is defined by planned connection with less informal mixing.

Each of these examples speaks to the power of the network: no single social infrastructure site can deliver it all. Different spaces — indoor and outdoor, some for neighborly nods and others for deep connection, some for active recreation and some for quiet contemplation — all have a role to play in the neighborhood. They feed off of one another, driving spillover activity and connections between sites that shape the full spectrum of social connection that our communities urgently need.

Shaping social infrastructure networks requires coordinated governance across the many entities that make these sites possible.

Realizing this utopian vision of networked social infrastructure is no easy feat — especially because the landscape of public space operations is more complex than ever. Municipal departments are often divided by space type — streets, parks, libraries — with minimal opportunities for coordinated planning. Moreover, as public investment in public spaces has declined over decades, a wide network of non-profit conservancies, BIDs, and ‘friends of’ groups have taken up the mantle of stewardship. In New York City, one study in progress reveals close to 8,000 organizations across the five boroughs charged with stewarding public spaces.

The bright side of this shift is a more resident-driven operating model than a public agency can provide. The shadow side is an underfunded army of “invisible labor” (in the words of one study interviewee) and a growing network of “customers” the public sector struggles to support on a relatively small portion of the city budget. What results are high coordination costs and a fragmented funding landscape.

In New York City, for example, coordination between Transportation and Parks was challenging in the Lower East Side — such as at adjacent Seward Park and Straus Square, where maintenance and storage require interagency negotiation. In Poughkeepsie, about 40 separate grants were required to support a single after-school program at the Family Partnership Center. Across all sites, operators reported labyrinthian insurance, liability, and permitting requirements that sapped staff time and energy.

This complicated web of coordination is not just a back-office annoyance. Bit by bit, it widens the gap between where we are today and where we need to be: funding connected places that welcome connected people. As Maria Torres-Springer, former New York City First Deputy Mayor and President of The Charles H. Revson Foundation shared at the launch event for this report:

“It’s not just about one project like a library or a park. We are talking about a real change in the systems. It requires an understanding and willingness to think about this as a network. The city org chart is organized by different agencies that don’t work together. They don’t organize from a policy, budget, or programming perspective. The system needs to be moved and changed and resourced properly versus a loose federation of things.”

A “loose federation” captures what it feels like to experience and operate social infrastructure in so many communities today. You may cherish your neighbors, but have nowhere to hang out with them. You may have a park you love, but have no way to get there safely and easily. You may staff a local library, but lack the budget or team you need to keep it running.

Indeed, even if the study found that social infrastructure often does what we hoped for — build friendships, belonging, and trust — the results are uneven. They were strongest where spaces formed a connected, walkable network, and weakest where gaps in design, mobility and investment kept people apart. Behind every striving and thriving public space was a group of agencies, nonprofits and neighbors making it work, often in spite of the systems meant to support them. The lesson is clear: connected people, connected places and connected governance are not three separate goals. They are deeply intertwined. Addressing them together is at the heart of our work to restore and reshape the country’s social infrastructure.

Eamon O’Connor is a senior project manager for Gehl.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

The Critical Infrastructure of Connection was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Friendship in America has seemingly become more difficult lately, with numerous articles wondering why it seems so hard to make friends, why we struggle to see the friends we have and why so many of us feel alone. In trying to answer these questions, there are apparent reasons: the alienating impacts of social media and technology, the segregation into communities divided by income, politics and belief, and a decline in the kinds of organized opportunities to meet and hang out that we used to have.

Data shows the social connection crisis is dire: Americans are growing increasingly isolated and anti-social, compounded by factors like education attainment, where people without college degrees have reported having fewer friends than their peers with college degrees. Teenagers struggle to gather together, with a lack of space available for their social and community needs. Trust in our fellow Americans has rapidly declined in recent years.

One less mentioned factor is that spending time together can be pricey, costing people an increasing amount of money in this age of rising inflation and financial pressure. Yet with the right programming and planning, our public spaces can be the best and most affordable way for people to meet each other and to stay connected — because in this fractured and polarized era, we can’t afford to be isolated.

Here is a roundup of articles exploring the challenges of making friends in our modern world, and how public spaces can be the solution.

Bringing shared interests to shared spaces

Social clubs have a long history in America, from fraternal organizations to interest groups to cultural societies. Yet memberships in traditional clubs are on the wane, as well documented in ‘Bowling Alone’ and related research. The current version of the social club has to bridge the gap between online invitations to gathering in person. It’s been called “soft socializing” — where get-togethers are organized and pitched to groups of strangers, but not focused on networking, Grace Snelling writes in Fast Company. Data from Eventbrite, the digital event organizing platform, shows that there’s high interest in participating in activities — trivia night events on the platform across the country are up 403% year-over-year. Mahjong tournaments, plant swaps and terrarium workshops also recorded high turnout.

This is where public spaces are a natural solution as the host and facilitator for such gatherings. A New York puzzle club took advantage of the city’s outdoor public spaces in summertime by hosting free gatherings at plazas and parks for enthusiasts to come together in a zero-cost, low pressure environment. There’s a clear appetite for socializing with folks over shared interests — and public spaces are the way to answer that need while keeping costs down for all involved.

Making space to make friends

When institutional resources are available to encourage socialization, the results can be incredibly impactful. In Philadelphia, the cost of admission to one of the city’s hottest groups is just the time it takes to put on shoes and show up. We Walk PHL is a free walking club that’s open to anyone, organized by a collaboration between the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Fairmount Park Conservancy, and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation. A decade of survey data shows immensely high returns for the participant, and for society — 91% of walkers reported improved mental health, 87% reported improved physical health, and 86% reported forming relationships in the program that lasted beyond We Walk PHL. The bonding factors of club t-shirts, regularly scheduled activities and trust in each other to show up for the weekly walk are the foundations for strong connections.

“Some people don’t have anybody to talk to at all. They don’t even have family,” Margie Witts told WHYY’s Nicole Leonard. “You get to become a family.” The popularity of the program, and its expansion to cover 29 city parks with dozens of club walks, shows the power of simple ideas executed well by institutions and community groups with the resources to spread the movement.

Expanding the boundaries of socializing

With intentionality and creativity, socializing can happen just about anywhere — including places for furry animals and humans alike. In Ohio, staffers at the Friends of Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks decided to bring organized social events to the area’s dog runs in public parks after hearing their own peers lament the difficulty of making new buddies.

The parameters of the “Make A Friend: Coffee & Dogs” event are flexible — indeed, dogs aren’t required, and participants aren’t expected to buy a thing. “It’s a public area, it’s free for everyone, it’s a great place to go if you want to meet up with a friend or meet new people,” organizer Melissa Meyer told the Columbus Dispatch. The value of these types of loosely structured events is that it opens the door and invites people in — and bringing them to public spaces like parks and dog runs are the most accessible way to do so.

What socializing looks like around the world

The crisis of social isolation amid spiking prices is not uniquely American. In Australia, the need is documented by the national initiative “Ending Loneliness Together,” created by a nationwide network of universities and industry partners in light of research that showed nearly a third of Australians reported feeling lonely. One response has been the proliferation of social groups — with “Scrap and Yap” crafting meetups at pubs and hobby clubs at cafes, reported the ABC Australia. Barcelona has launched a City Agreement against Loneliness, with focus areas including combating isolation and the construction of public space to deepen social and community ties.

Canada’s isolation crisis mirrors our own: “in 2021 more than one in 10 Canadians reported they always or often feel lonely,” the CBC reported. Fortunately, the new Sanaaq public library in downtown Montreal functions as a community node while offering a cafe, black-box theater, media lab, social services hub and green oasis — and was created to serve as “a living space,” “a place for respite, peace, and exchange belonging to the citizens,” architecture critic Alex Bozikovic wrote for the Globe and Mail.

Why public space matters in an age of private equity

Given the scale and scope of the loneliness crisis, it’s not a surprise that entrepreneurs have taken note. Companies are betting that we can’t make friends without spending money. This ranges from paid programs like Bumble BFF to membership-based organizations like TimeLeft. Christine Emba, who sits on the board of the American Institute for Boys and Men, argues in the New York Times that relying on private options is capitalism trying to make money off of loneliness and isolation: “friendship as a pay-to-play luxury will continue to leave broad swaths of Americans out.” Researcher Dr. Marcella Meneguello writes that not only do paid clubs and organizations take your money, they also undermine the basic principles of how people develop friendships: “There is also a paradox at play with these apps. Friendship grows through repeated, sometimes awkward, real-world interaction — and those moments help us build social confidence and relationship skills. It’s worth asking whether paid social clubs reduce opportunities to develop these skills naturally.”

By using these services to avoid social discomfort, it may mean never building the skills that make the next connection easier to form on your own. Meanwhile, public spaces are open arenas for human development and interaction, without an entrance fee or subscription charge.

In our disconnected, distrustful era, the conversation about how people can make connections and benefit from friendship will continue. An important part of the solutions must be about the places we share equally, where anyone can meet someone new — no membership fee required. The evidence in these stories is consistent: people will show up when there is somewhere free, familiar and welcoming to show up to. That’s not a lifestyle trend or a market to be captured, it is the power of our shared civic infrastructure — something that works best when it is funded, programmed and cared for as a valuable good in our communities.

Our need for social connection is as elemental as being human. Our parks, libraries and plazas are where that need has always been met — and at a moment when so many are looking for a way back to each other, the least we can do is keep the doors open for all.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

Friendship Shouldn’t Be a Luxury Good was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the city that forged the foundational ideas of America, a bold initiative was launched in 2015 based on a core question: how might our public spaces — in Philadelphia and around the country — serve as joyful, healing, connective tissue during divisive times?

Ten years later, the ideas that led to the Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative have yielded results and influence throughout Philadelphia, and shown how this model can be expanded and replicated. In three neighborhoods — Parkside, Strawberry Mansion and Southwest Philadelphia — the Civic Commons efforts are deepening civic engagement and elevating neighborhood revitalization, while ensuring civic spaces are shared, common ground.

From innovative yet simple programming to a mindset shift of collaboration over competition, here are insights into how the ethos of the Civic Commons has flourished in Philadelphia and beyond — and how to bring that momentum to your own city.

Creative approaches can pay off beyond initial investment

After launching as a pilot in 2015, the Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative eventually expanded to cities including Memphis, Detroit and Akron. Yet Philadelphia, with its centuries-long commitment to public space dating back to William Penn, was an especially appropriate place to start. It was also a difficult one, challenged by high poverty rates, economic segregation and the ongoing struggles of an underfunded city government.

A decade on, the Philadelphia story demonstrates how Reimagining the Civic Commons’ innovative approach has rippled out across the city and introduced a generation of practitioners, advocates and allies to the beauty of investing in the civic commons that can deliver multiple benefits and offers a big bang for the buck.

The We Walk PHL program, launched in 2017, is a prime example of a low-cost yet highly effective activation of public space with enormous payoff. On paper, it’s a simple idea of a free walking club that meets weekly at local parks around the city, overseen by a partnership between Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Fairmount Park Conservancy, and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation. Participants get t-shirts, make social connections and new friends while exercising in local parks, becoming invested in the city’s environmental landscape along the way. Yet nine years after its inception at three initial parks, the program is extremely popular, with dozens of walks routinely happening at 29 parks around the city.

There are more than 2,300 participants, many of them regulars year after year — and Fairmount Park Conservancy’s participant surveys show that 91% of walkers reported improved mental health, 87% reported improved physical health and 86% reported forming relationships in the program that lasted beyond the program.

“We Walk PHL builds community. We Walk PHL builds lasting friendships. We Walk PHL fosters stewardship of our incredible parks, trails, and rec centers,” said James Garrow, Deputy Commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health. “All of these aspects of We Walk PHL are central to the health of our city and her residents.” The We Walk PHL program shows the best of how collaborations and smart programming can yield results far beyond financial investment.

Collaboration is key

The collaborative, multi-organizational approach also informs the Civic Commons Learning Network, where different organizations among the 11 Reimagining the Civic Commons city teams regularly connect with each other to inspire and improve each other’s work. Tonnetta Graham, president and executive director of the Strawberry Mansion Community Development Corporation, said the very nature of civic commons work is cooperative and multi-disciplinary.

“One of the best attributes of pulling all of this together is that we’re able to talk to other people who are doing the work in different areas, with different city structures and different finance structures — but you’re still able to look at those common goals and make these public spaces better for everybody,” she said.

The fruits of collaboration helped the Strawberry Mansion CDC launch a Historic Home Repair Program after neighbors expressed concerns that civic improvements — like the nearby Discovery Center, a public nature sanctuary and community center — would lead to unintended displacement. The program provided resources for local residents to invest in their existing homes, encouraging them to stay and thrive in the neighborhood — and was developed through partnerships forged during the Civic Commons pilot in Philadelphia, showing the importance of collaborative work as a tool to respond to broader neighborhood concerns.

Similarly, the Civic Commons portfolio approach was also honed in the Philadelphia pilot. Working together with the city Parks and Recreation Department and organizations like Bartram’s Garden and Centennial Parkside CDC has led to stronger, more meaningful outcomes. By sharing funding instead of competing for dollars, civic leaders can see one another as collaborators rather than competitors, and better positioned to manage their civic assets as a portfolio for the greater good. Planning together, rather than in isolation, can forge deeper trust among neighbors, local governments and community organizations.

Collaboration can also help improve maintenance and operations of public spaces. Philadelphia’s way of staffing public parks and community centers was similar to the widespread model of larger recreation centers getting more employees and programming, while smaller facilities and greenspaces are allocated fewer resources — regardless of the actual usage of these sites or community needs. Kathryn Ott Lovell, the original convener for the Philadelphia Civic Commons team and then the commissioner of the city parks and recreation department, saw the need for a different approach — one that would improve access and equity by combining resources.

“We created these program crews that could just be more dynamic…moving from a static staffing structure to a dynamic staffing structure,” she said. The department pooled resources from different communities so that program crews could rotate locations depending on need, rather than be permanently assigned to specific recreation centers — making the staffing, programming and activities more fairly distributed across neighborhoods and the city as a whole.

Make space to bring people together across different backgrounds and demographics

Socioeconomic mixing — one of the four key outcomes of the Reimagining the Civic Commons model to reduce loneliness and increase economic mobility — improves when facilities can provide unique programming and amenities to draw in a larger, more diverse audience. It’s one of the goals for Ott Lovell, who now runs the Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation headquartered in historic Independence Mall. She has brought the civic commons mindset to welcoming tourists to the city, opening the building up for visitors to use the restrooms and facilities — and tacitly encouraging different groups to mingle along the way. The visitor center building also offers free space for local vendors to sell their wares and hosts free events. The Phambassador program is another civic-oriented brainchild of Ott Lovell’s — a volunteer program training local residents to share their Philadelphia knowledge and hometown pride with visitors. It’s all part of the idea of “radical hospitality” to build broader connections across divisions, Ott Lovell said.

That mingling of different groups in welcoming public spaces is what Tony Sorrentino, chief executive officer of Fairmount Park Conservancy, called a winning combination of physical places with the goal of building trust and social connection. The conservancy manages a slate of the city’s parks, including FDR Park — South Philadelphia’s largest green space — where intentional programming is elevating the civic asset experience while drawing people together in a demonstration of the Reimagining the Civic Commons model.

“What I like about Reimagining the Civic Commons is that it’s this combination…of hardware and software coming together,” Sorrentino said. Public spaces are the hardware, but they need to be activated by trust-building and social connection — the software — to develop a strong civic commons.

Ensure the work continues on through the next generation

The impacts of the Civic Commons model over a decade means people who have intersected with the work are bringing the ethos with them as their lives and careers progress. “If we’re able to influence people at every level, eventually they’re going to become the leaders and this is just going to be part of their core values, like me,” Ott Lovell said.

Exemplifying this notion, former Philadelphia co-convener Kevin Roche, now at PowerCorpsPHL, says the true legacy is the paradigm shift in how he thinks about community work and social connection — that delivering the best possible outcomes for the community should be expected. “The funding disappears — we still work this way. We may not do exactly the same number of movie nights or whatever, but it’s the same principles that are valuable inherently,” he said.

The impact of this way of thinking is undeniable in Philadelphia — the city’s current $500+ million Rebuild initiative, with its investments in parks, recreation centers and libraries, is a direct descendant of the Civic Commons ethos. Funded by the William Penn Foundation and the Philadelphia Beverage Tax on sugary drinks, Rebuild is the city’s biggest investment in decades, updating 72 parks, recreation centers and libraries. The Johnny Sample (Cobbs Creek) Recreation Center and the Cobbs Creek Environmental Center, for example, recently reopened after a $15 million renovation. Community input shaped the design, with residents asking for amenities that would draw people from multiple neighborhoods, such as a boxing training gym and upgraded pool. On the grounds, the Fairmount Park Conservancy planted 1,700 native plants. Tiny WPA, a local public design non-profit organization, co-designed and co-built the center’s custom benches, cubbies, welcome desk, and other interior features with reclaimed beams from the original rec center, teaching their teen program along the way.

By having the community help shape the design of the renovated center and weaving in environmental resiliency into the plans, the Civic Commons priorities are evident throughout the Cobbs Creek project.

Ten years of investing in people and civic commons has led not only to flourishing public spaces in Philadelphia, but more importantly, to a commitment to core principles of collaboration, innovation and connection across diversity. This ethos is embedded in an entire generation of local practitioners and leaders — who are carrying this influence into their own work.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

How Philadelphia Revived the Civic City was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“The way that we knit ourselves back together…is often through repetitive engagement to ritual.”

— Artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya

In 2026, practitioners, leaders and community members from Reimagining the Civic Commons cities gathered in San José for our 11th Studio, where more than 120 of us explored how a fast-growing, tech-driven city is building belonging and connection. Two facilitated conversations from the Studio floor kept circling back to the same idea: that belonging isn’t something that simply happens to us — it’s something we build, deliberately and repeatedly, through ritual.

In one session, transdisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya and Ashley Gallegos of UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute joined Kresge Foundation’s Alexa Bush to talk about the practice and the theory of belonging — what it requires, what erodes it, and how public art and public policy each try to build it. In another, Michael Norton, the Harvard Business School professor behind the book The Ritual Effect, sat down with Knight Foundation’s Kyle Kutuchief to unpack the research behind why rituals — from family dinners to civic events — bind communities together, and why the same mechanics can just as easily divide them.

Read together, the two conversations sketch a working theory for civic commons practitioners: ritual is the mechanism to work towards belonging, and what we design and program in public space can make a big difference.

Before anyone said a word about rituals and belonging, San José Studio participants demonstrated how these principles work on different days and in different rooms.

Michael Norton opened his fireside chat with Kyle Kutuchief the way a musician or comedian might tune up a room. He asked the crowd of Studio practitioners to clap together, nothing more elaborate than that. Within seconds, the scattered noise of more than a hundred individual claps folded into a single rhythm, though no one led the beat. And without anyone telling it to move faster, the tempo crept upward anyway, the way it always does when a crowd claps in unison, hundreds of hands matching each other and speeding up together, as if we had agreed to do so in advance. For Norton, it was a demonstration of one of his research findings, that if prompted the right way, people can easily fall into sync. It was a demonstration of ritual as a capacity people already carry, waiting to be called on.

In another session, artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya reached for something older and slower to make the same point. She opened not with an exercise but with a poem: Remember, by Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate. Harjo’s poem does not ask readers to imagine a better future, Phingbodhipakkiya told the room; it asks them to remember they are already woven into one, into the land, into each other, into lineages longer than any single life.

She chose it, she said, “to ground us,” reading it slowly before the conversation properly began. The poem, Phingbodhipakkiya said, shows us that “repetition, that insistence, to me, that is ritual. It’s an act of endurance. It is something that carries us through rupture, through displacement, through moments where we feel unmoored.”

For Phingbodhipakkiya, that idea isn’t abstract. She grew up in the kitchens of her father’s Thai restaurants, working in the heat to peel garlic before she learned to sew or sculpt. Because of this, she often returns to the Thai word for family, “kalpkua,” which translates literally to “cover the kitchen,” or to protect what sustains you. This is close to a mission statement for her art practice, which she builds around holding “both the wound and repair and nourishment at the same time.”

Michael Norton’s research arrives at the same idea from the opposite direction, not a poem passed down or a kitchen inherited across generations, but the dinner table, on an ordinary weekday. Norton told the audience that if you ask a kid how school was that day, you will likely get a one word answer back: “Good.” Norton studies how families build small, repeatable rituals into that dead air, his favorite being the rosebud and thorn, where everyone at the table names one good thing and one hard thing experienced during their day. It sounds like a small thing, but it works.

“These little things — even if your kids are rolling their eyes because they have to do it — you’re still getting connection,” Norton said of the ritual.

Norton has a name for what turns noise like that into something more: a ritual is just a habit that we have given meaning to. Repeat an action enough times, and with enough intention, it stops being the sum of its motions. A crowd finding its own rhythm without being told, a poem asking a room to remember what it already carries, a kitchen’s inherited discipline, a five-minute habit at a family dinner table: in different ways, Norton and Phingbodhipakkiya,were pointing to how belonging is built, over and over, through rituals large and small, with implications for how we design, manage and program public space.

What belonging requires

Belonging, as Ashley Gallegos’s own institute defines it, is a vision for creating a world where every person is seen, valued, and empowered, not simply a feeling, but something structures actively build or withhold.

Rituals are important to help people feel like they belong to each other, to the community and to themselves. Gallegos opened by naming the state of belonging at this moment in America, where our political climate has some people experiencing an elevated sense of belonging, a belonging which comes wrapped in layers of exclusion for others.

That tension sits at the center of Gallegos’s work at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, where she and her colleagues pursue what a “moonshot goal” of making belonging without othering a global norm. The institute studies othering — the patterns of harm and marginalization that recur across history, from bias and seclusion to the denial of citizenship itself — working directly with communities, civic hubs, and coalitions to counter it.

Belonging, in Gallegos’s framing, is the opposite of othering: a vision in which every being is seen, valued, and cared for. Gallegos argues that systems and structures play an active role in building belonging, or just as often, withholding it. In practice, she’s distilled it into four traits: inclusion, connection, recognition, and agency, with the last meaning the ability to actually shape what you are participating in.

It’s the first of those traits, inclusion, that draws Gallegos’s sharpest critique. Too often, she said, inclusion gets performed rather than practiced, in what she calls “Noah’s Ark syndrome,” the reflex to gather “two of these and two of those” and call the room diverse. That’s inclusion as a demand for legibility, and echoed a point Phingbodhipakkiya had made earlier, that it is possible to be counted without ever being welcomed.

Which leads to the distinction Gallegos wants practitioners to carry with them: the absence of othering is not the same thing as belonging. The practice of simply not excluding someone is a decent starting point, she allowed, but still not the destination. Her institute’s director, John Powell, calls upon people to be “bridgers,” showing up for others across differences and being willing to understand people’s lives though they are unlike your own.

Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s landmark 1995 paper established belonging as its own basic human need, as fundamental as food or shelter; later research building on it found that a sense of belonging alone predicts close to half the variance in depression symptoms, independent of how socially connected someone otherwise is. Gallegos and her Othering & Belonging Institute colleagues take that a step further, arguing in their own published framework that belonging is something structures either build or block, which includes places like parks, libraries and trails.

The materials and mechanics of ritual

Phingbodhipakkiya’s sculptures and installations are, in a literal sense, made of history. She works in porcelain, sugar cane, silk; materials she chooses because they already carry the weight of labor, trade, and dispossession before she’s touched them. Two philosophers shape how she works with that weight. The first is Édouard Glissant and his idea of the “right to opacity,” the idea that people and cultures should be allowed to retain their unique, irreducible complexity and mystery without being forced to conform to Western standards of total transparency. Without that right, she said, inclusion can become something narrower: “We’re going to include you, but perform your identity…so to me, that may be inclusion, but it’s inclusion without welcome.” The second is Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, about the matsutake mushroom that grows only in logged and ruined forests — a species that resists cultivation but thrives in the wreckage left behind by an industry that moved on, pulling disparate communities together in the process.

In other words, imaginative new realities arrive because of devastation, sadness and ruin, and this philosophy is built into “Gather,” a series of ritual installations Phingbodhipakkiya staged across the plazas at Lincoln Center several years ago. Drawing on Thai tradition, she set nine mirrored sculptures in a water feature and invited passersby to write down what they’d lost: My brother Joel. Faith in our institutions. Connection. Belonging. The ritual didn’t ask anyone to become friends with the stranger standing beside them. “You didn’t necessarily leave best friends with the person you were paired up with,” she said, “but you held each other in the moment, and that’s enough.”

Michael Norton’s research on rituals gives that same instinct — that we value what we’ve helped build or mend — a name: the IKEA effect. In studies ranging from watercolor paintings to sets of Lego, Norton has found that people consistently overvalue what they have made with their own hands. In one Harvard Business School exercise, executives who’d assembled a small Lego structure bid $50 to $100 just to avoid having it taken apart again. Kutuchief connected this phenomenon directly to public space. “In San José, they shared the cash-for-trash program where residents are compensated to help clean up public space,” Kutuchief told the room. “That’s people caring about the place and having a hand in its assembly or stewardship, which increases the likelihood that they would care about it.”

That’s not an abstract claim in San José. The cash-for-trash program runs alongside a 2024 policy that cleared encampments along the Guadalupe River Park trail, moving roughly 200 people from tents into housing while reducing runoff and pollution along the riverbanks. Trail visits, which had fallen for seven straight years to a low of 175,000, climbed back to 208,000 in 2024 — a rebound that tracks with the kind of stewardship Norton is describing, not just the enforcement behind it.

Norton closed the thought with a related idea: the time-capsule effect, in which mundane, forgettable objects become meaningful the moment they’re buried, forgotten, and rediscovered. Kutuchief made the public-space connection himself, describing Summit Lake in his hometown of Akron, a place that had sat neglected and unused for years before being reclaimed. “That reclamation of places that were not for people for so long, and now they are again — that is delightful,” Kutuchief said.

Designing rituals that unite instead of divide

Getting people to move, sound, and feel like one group is powerful — but a group bonded around “us” is also a group that’s drawn a line around “them,” Norton reminded us. His research offers a way to defuse that line before it hardens: what he calls cross-cutting affiliation. Tell two people only that one is from Boston and the other from New York, he said, and the fastest thing they’ll find to talk about is what makes them different. But shift the frame, for example bringing up California, and the same two people suddenly discover they’re both from the East Coast. It is a design principle as much as a psychological one: the quickest way to move people from noticing what separates them to noticing what they share is to present them with a new reference point.

Regular, shared rituals can also help bond people to each other, even if (or perhaps because) they are lighthearted and build on a shared identity. Norton’s favorite example of this is the Maine Lobster Festival, where competitors try to run across a string of floating lobster crates in Rockland Harbor without falling in the water. It works, he argues, because it follows a formula durable enough to build a program around: find an identity that people share, make it a little ridiculous, and invite everyone in.

Norton ended his conversation with Kutuchief with something smaller and just as repeatable, which was a finding from his research on prosocial spending. Norton and a fellow researcher found that people who spend money on someone else consistently report more happiness than people who spend the same amount on themselves. People do not have to spend much, Norton said — a coffee bought for a stranger can suffice — but doing something small for others is a ritual practitioners could incorporate into public space work.

Yet creating shared rituals and increasing belonging in public space does not mean that all friction between people falls away. Though sometimes it feels uncomfortable, Phingbodhipakkiya and Gallegos discussed how friction is not a sign that a public process has gone wrong, but a sign that something is working. Phingbodhipakkiya described watching public art get flattened into consensus by committees trying to avoid conflict entirely, when the more honest — and more difficult — path is to let a proposal center one community’s voice without treating that as a threat to everyone else. “This is actually the place of change, of productivity, of emergence,” she said.

Phingbodhipakkiya made the point that belonging can feel like friction before it feels like connection, and that discomfort is not evidence that something has gone wrong, but is often the first sign that the work is real.

Practicing rituals of belonging in public space

Gallegos ended her session on the same idea that runs through her institute’s whole framework: that belonging is best co-created. That means design processes where people can see their input actually shape the outcome, but it also means accepting that co-creation is not the same as unanimity. People participating in public process do not get everything they ask for; but the community gets something that has been built together. “You don’t get your way, but you get enough,” Gallegos said.

As the Studio practitioners considered how to incorporate belonging into their own work, Gallegos gave them a question to ponder as they headed home: “Where can we make our boundaries a little bit more porous to invite in more folks? That is the true work.” Norton believes that rituals — habits to which humans have given meaning — are one way to make these boundaries more porous. Whether it is a clap finding a shared rhythm, a poem read aloud to ground a room, or a silly ritual that bonds people around a shared identity, Norton reminded practitioners that belonging is not a final destination; “it’s something they need to keep doing.”

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

Can Rituals Help Hold Communities Together? was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last year, the FBI released its 2024 Uniform Crime Report data, covering public safety agencies that represent more than 95% of the U.S. population. The verdict: violent crime dropped an estimated 4.5% year-over-year, and property crime fell more than 8% — both landing at their lowest recorded rates since at least 1969.

City-level data backs this up. A Council on Criminal Justice mid-year 2025 report tracking 42 U.S. cities found homicide down 17%, gun assaults down 21%, motor vehicle theft down 25%, and burglary down 47% compared to the same period the year before.

Two independent, credible sources show the same trend: crime in America is falling. If you’re an elected official or a police leader, these headlines are good news.

The perception gap

But falling crime does not automatically register among a community’s residents, because the people do not always feel it. National polling has for years shown a stubborn gap between when crime rates fall and public belief that crime is rising. Even in 2025, in the midst of that improvement, 49% of people still called crime an extremely or very “serious” problem, and believed it was increasing — better than pandemic-era highs of concern, but still far out of step with the actual decline in crime statistics.

That gap is where the public realm comes in — and it is a lever most public safety strategies never include. A growing body of research shows that investing in an orderly, well-managed public realm sets off a chain reaction: it changes how safe people feel, which increases how much time people spend out in public space, which reduces the opportunities for crime to occur, which, in turn, reduces actual crime. That’s why the design, programming and management of the public realm should be a cornerstone of a community’s comprehensive public safety strategy.

What changes how safe people feel

Researchers increasingly separate two different questions: whether a place is actually dangerous, and whether people feel like it is dangerous. A 2026 study published in npj Urban Sustainability, a Nature-family journal, surveyed 356 residents across three cities in metropolitan Asunción, Paraguay, about their sense of safety in 92 different public green spaces. The finding: visible signs of physical disorder — poor maintenance, broken furniture, vandalism — significantly lowered how safe people felt, while actual crime history in an area did not meaningfully predict how safe people felt. A park doesn’t have to be dangerous to feel dangerous. It just has to look uncared for.

Or, as one Rotterdam resident put it in a similarly themed study: “When it is clean it feels like someone else is looking after it and it belongs to us. It is being taken care of.”

That finding about perception is powerful on its own, but the data also shows a cared-for public realm changes what actually happens, not just how people feel about it. Some of the clearest evidence comes from Philadelphia, where in a randomized controlled trial, researchers cleaned, mowed and planted grass on vacant lots across the city — without turning them into activated gathering spaces — and tracked what happened in the surrounding blocks.

The result: a 29% reduction in gun violence and a 22% drop in burglaries in nearby neighborhoods. Residents living near the lots had their own perceptions shift even more sharply — people reported feeling 37% less worried about crime, 39% less worried about vandalism, and 58% less concerned about safety overall. Notably, this was not about more people gathering in these spaces; the lots were cleared and mowed, not turned into parks. That’s instructive for officials weighing funding decisions: even a modest maintenance investment, with no major capital project attached, moved the needle on both safety and the perception of safety.

The Philadelphia data is not an isolated finding. A study of 301 major U.S. cities found that census blocks with more greenspace had measurably lower rates of both property and violent crime. Separate research on park visitors found that good maintenance and cleanliness (tied closely with tree cover) was the single most valued feature for encouraging people to visit a park, be active in it, and interact with their neighbors there.

The effect isn’t limited to maintenance and greenery, either. A randomized study of public space regeneration in a high-crime neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, found that improving public space significantly raised residents’ perceived safety as well. In the neighborhood of La Chappelle in Paris, a variety of concurrent strategies that include new greenery as well as beautiful bike and walking infrastructure have started to make the area less of a draw for crime and drug activity, according to local leaders.

It is important to note that the areas surrounding a public space deserve equally important focus. Behavioral scientists have long documented a peak-end rule — the finding that people’s memory of an experience is shaped disproportionately by its most intense moment and by how it ends, not by an average of the whole thing. A 2023 study of walking paths and sound in an urban park found this same pattern holds for the experience of moving through green space: whatever a visitor encounters right before a walk ends carries outsized weight in their overall impression. If the sidewalk connecting a park to a neighborhood is broken, poorly lit, lined with vacant lots or noisy, that will be the impression a visitor carries away. A great park surrounded by a neglected streetscape can still be remembered as a bad experience overall, hampering the perception of safety by leaving that last, worst impression.

A virtuous cycle worth investing in

Much of this research points to a self-reinforcing loop, with lessons for local leaders. In fact, when addressing public safety through the public realm, the order of operations matters.

An orderly, high-quality public realm — its design, its programming, and how behavior in it is managed — changes how safe people feel. As perceptions of safety improve, more people use the space: they linger, they let their kids play, they walk through it instead of around it. More than 60 years ago, Jane Jacobs argued that ordinary people going about their day, whether walking, sitting on stoops, or watching from windows, function as a kind of informal “eyes on the street” that deter crime. More people in a well-used public space means more of exactly that kind of informal oversight, which shrinks the opportunities for crime to happen unnoticed. And fewer opportunities for crime lead, over time, to less actual crime.

This loop doesn’t happen by accident — it’s something a city can deliberately design, program and manage for. And it gives officials an evidence-based case to make to constituents, department heads and budget committees: the public realm is a public safety investment, not just a quality-of-life amenity.

We’ve seen the cycle play out inside our own network of cities. In Memphis, the investment in the reimagining of a couple small parks with the addition of inviting lighting and new evening programming along the Mississippi River changed how safe downtown felt in a few short years: the share of intercept-survey respondents who said they felt safe downtown at night nearly doubled, from 37% to 68%. Average weekend visitor counts at the transformed River Garden park more than doubled in just four years.

Practical takeaways for public safety

If you are interested in your community both feeling and becoming safer, here are 5 ways to elevate community safety through the public realm

Focus on maintenance, and fix things when they break. As Philadelphia city forester Erica Smith Fichman put it, “maintenance is trust building.” In San José, a routine repair and pressure-wash schedule kept a community mural on a pedestrian street downtown in shape and helped bring visitorship back to pre-pandemic levels. In Camden, New Jersey, the Camden Strong initiative has removed more than 1,300 tons of trash and debris from public spaces over four years — and city officials report a corresponding drop in illegal dumping alongside it.

A classic example of this principle is the clean up of Bryant Park in New York City, which in the 1980s was overrun with drug dealing. A new management nonprofit started to turn the park around with pure maintenance — repairing structures, clearing graffiti, picking up trash, and adding a security presence — and saw crime drop 92% within seven years.

Design for it. When building or redesigning a space, lean on what the research shows works: clear sightlines, planting and caring for flowers and trees, good lighting, activated nearby ground floors and — where there’s a vacant or blighted lot nearby — caring for it. The results can be dramatic. In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood northwest of the city’s downtown, layered investments in the public realm that included a park and greenway, an upgraded commercial corridor, meadow plantings and new programming increased resident perceptions of safety in the neighborhood at night by 36% — demonstrating the value of these investments on safety.

Staff for welcoming, not just security. Memphis River Parks Partnerships’ Park Ranger program created new positions that combined traditional maintenance and operational roles with work as a kind of park concierge, greeting and assisting visitors and reinforcing clear, welcoming norms of behavior. The organization chose rangers over uniformed security in part because of concerns about how traditional security staff might impact the enjoyment of the park for diverse visitors. The Park Rangers helped underscore the ethos that everyone is welcome — as long as they follow those basic behavior norms — and rangers help set and model that expectation, at a fraction of the cost of policing.

Activate your space. Markets, programs like fitness or dance classes, seating and food or retail kiosks all increase who uses and thus feels partly responsible for a public space throughout the day and especially in the evening — exactly the kind of informal “eyes on the street” that Jane Jacobs described decades ago. Fairmount Park Conservancy has diverse programming in Philadelphia parks that includes popular weekly walking clubs, dance classes, evening stargazing and large culinary events — a robust calendar of regular activity that keeps people flowing into spaces at all times of the day.

Invest in quality connections. A park, library or trail is only as welcoming as the spaces that surround it. Reimagining the Civic Commons’ network of cities has found that closing gaps between public spaces changes how safe and connected a whole neighborhood and its residents feel. For example, in Lexington, Kentucky, residents who live near Addison Park faced walks of 20 minutes or more to reach a park that was, in a straight line, only five minutes away due to fences and limited access points. A community survey found that 54% of respondents named pedestrian connections and accessibility as their top priority, and the city is now completing sidewalks and adding more entry points in response — actions that research shows will help with the perception of safety in the public spaces themselves.

Track and report progress. Having public space practitioners, advocates and even residents track perceptions of safety alongside other metrics, and reporting the results, can build support for current and future efforts. Our open-source measurement toolkit includes observation maps and intercept surveys that track the perception of safety in public space and surrounding neighborhoods; the frequency of visits; trust in others and in institutions; and who’s actually showing up to visit — tools any organization can adapt to track their investments.

The bottom line

The data is clear: crime is down, but plenty of people don’t feel it yet. Well-managed, well-maintained public space is one of the few tools that moves both numbers at once — people’s perceptions of safety and the actual crime rate. That gap can be closed best from the ground up: in a city that keeps its parks, plazas and streets clean, well lit and actively managed. That’s the safety dividend: investment in the public realm shows up first in how safe a place feels, then in how safe it actually is. It compounds every year a city keeps paying into it, and is a public safety strategy worth pursuing in every community.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

The Safety Dividend: The Surprising Impact of Well-Managed Public Spaces was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What does belonging and social connection look like in an era defined by the tech industry and explosive growth? In the heart of Silicon Valley, the Bay Area’s largest city is carving a path to those shared goals amid the digital revolution through uplifting identity and insisting on space for belonging.

More than 120 cross-silo practitioners came to San José, California in May for Studio #11: Diverse Cultures, Common Ground to explore ideas of how growth can co-exist along with community and connection. Modern innovations are the latest chapter in a story of successive reinventions of this city about 50 miles south of San Francisco — from agricultural valley and farmland to the tech capital of Silicon Valley.

San José State University Dean Dr. Anne Marie Todd described the central question: amid rapid growth and economic change, how might we create belonging for all in the region that makes placelessness and virtual living possible? The answers must include the kind of public infrastructure that’s been around throughout history. As Councilmember Michael Mulcahy noted in his keynote speech, “people create places to come together — churches, markets, parks, districts — because culture only survives when it has somewhere to live.”

We saw how the civic commons remain central to culture in San José as a crucial foundation amidst rapid change. Through connected public space, coalition-building, belonging and ritual, and nurturing a philosophy of stewardship, San José is mapping the way to a shared future for all.

Roots and ruptures: in the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”

San José’s agricultural legacy is interwoven with its immigrant and native histories (Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Japanese and Chinese — and before all of them, the Tamien Nation of the Ohlone people). Those narratives have shaped the modern city and its leaders. Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong grew up in San José in a Vietnamese enclave helping her family navigate the U.S. system. As the first Vietnamese American and Asian American woman to serve on the County Board of Supervisors, Duong is keenly aware of the importance of maintaining cultural resources for the city’s residents, who are majority non-white; more than 40% of the city’s population speak a language other than English at home. Putting resources in immigrant neighborhoods is intentional connective tissue to the communities — places like “Little Saigon allows you not to shed your language or identity,” Duong said.

San José’s growth accelerated after World War II, when the city grew from 17 to 137 square miles in two decades leading to rapid loss of farmland made into suburban-style housing. The growth brought highway infrastructure that severed neighborhoods from each other, including Little Italy and Eastside communities. California’s passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 further exacerbated structural inequality by capping property taxes and limiting property assessment increases as values rise, thus restricting local government tax revenues and reducing the ability of the public sector to serve the sprawling community’s needs.

The city’s current challenges are how to encourage sustainable growth when economic disparity is so pronounced, Camille Llanes-Fontanilla of Sobrato Philanthropies noted. She pointed out that if the wealth across the valley was distributed evenly across every family, each one would have a million dollars — yet most families make $30,000 to $60,000 a year. Black and brown communities remain cut off from resources, so leaders must ensure they gain from economic development but are not displaced. This is the central dilemma facing San José, Llanes-Fontanilla said: Belonging is critical. How do we not play the game of scarcity and uplift all cultural groups?

What belonging means

A compelling highlight of the Studio was the “Belonging, Othering, Ritual, and the Public Realm” panel with multidisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya and Ashley Gallegos, director of the Places of Belonging Program at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. They spoke with The Kresge Foundation’s Alexa Bush about belonging in a fractured world, building connection through inclusion and recognition of agency — in contrast with othering, which Gallegos defined as “a pattern of harms and marginalizations that people, groups, and societies have replicated across space and time” through violence, bias, exclusion and denial of rights.

Crucially at this point in America’s history, Gallegos noted a critical distinction: you can have belonging that is built for some at the exclusion of others. In the current political moment, some people are experiencing elevated belonging — but with layers of exclusion for others, she said.

Phingbodhipakkiya has worked to counter that exclusion with artistic acts of building community and belonging through her art pieces like the “GATHER” installation at New York’s Lincoln Center. Based on the Thai tradition of Loy Krathong (floating vessels carrying burdens into water), Phingbodhipakkiya invited everyday people to create ritual through writing what they have lost on mirrored vessels, while messages floated in a water feature to embody what the audience most cherished — examples like “my brother Joel,” “faith in our institutions,” and “connection.”

Phingbodhipakkiya called belonging “an act of endurance… something that carries us through rupture, through displacement, through moments where we feel unmoored.”

Belonging can feel uncomfortable when friction arises — while we naturally pull away from those feelings of discord, friction is actually a sign of authentic work, she said. It’s not a failure to feel sharp edges when building a community.

Key to belonging and connection are rituals, as we explored in another memorable session. Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton began a fireside chat with Kyle Kutuchief of the Knight Foundation by first leading the audience through a rousing series of clapping, stomping and chanting as a demonstration of the bonding power of ritual.

From spectacles like sporting events, to finding community within organized religion, to nightly family dinners — where the daily conversation with children starts with the same prompts of each day’s highlights, low points and looking forward to anticipated events — ritual involves care, involvement and tradition. Ensuring that communities make space for these rituals to nurture these connections is key to healthier, thriving societies.

The traditions don’t need to be official or even serious in nature. Norton pointed to one of his favorite rituals, an annual event at the Maine Lobster Festival where competitors try to run across a string of floating lobster crates in Rockland Harbor as an example: “find the core thing, make it a little ridiculous, invite everyone in.” We also saw vivid demonstrations of this during FIFA World Cup games with fans and the Norwegian men’s soccer team doing the “Viking Row” cheer. At their best, rituals can serve as inclusive acts that bond without excluding and are designed for shared, accessible experiences.

Public space as governance made visible

In his keynote address to the Studio, Councilmember Mulcahy painted his family story as a mirror of the greater changes happening to San José: his Italian great-grandparents migrated to the region, drawn by the opportunities in California and the agricultural climate similar to their hometown. The next chapters of his grandfather’s cannery empire to the manufacturing industry’s displacement by tech — one family’s arc reflects the region’s evolution.

Mulcahy, who attended a recent Civic Commons Learning Journey in Paris, said he is working to bring lessons he learned there back to San José, chief among them that great cities are built not through one-off projects but through “steady, sustained commitment over time” and “a shared expectation that public spaces matter, and that caring for them is a core civic responsibility.”

“Residents experience government through the condition of shared space — not through plans or presentations, but through whether a park feels safe, whether a trail is usable, whether a place feels cared for. That is governance made visible.” In practice, this means lighting, cleanliness, maintenance and activation are not just features, but civic signals of care and belonging.

Repairing what was disrupted and building new connections

We learned about how San José has activated these signals during site visits to Civic Commons projects in the downtown district, where the maintenance of public areas is a visible sign of the city’s dedicated stewardship of those shared spaces. After the city passed a “no encampment” zone policy in 2024, about 200 people who were living in tents along the Guadalupe River Park trail have moved to housing. A “cash for trash” program, housing assistance and wrap-around services have extended the resources available to the vulnerable populations as the city cleans up the area. These policies and programs have also reduced the pollution along the riverbanks, helping to create a cleaner and healthier waterway.

These investments have increased the appeal for a variety of public programming now regularly held at Arena Green, a park situated right along the river, and brought visitors back to the Guadalupe River TrailPark. The change has been evident: trail usage has increased, with 208,000 recorded park goers in 2024 after visitorship had dropped for 7 years straight to a low of 175,000 people the previous year.

Effective coalitions are key. In Arena Green, the San José Downtown Association, Guadalupe River Park Conservancy and Conservation Corps are filling maintenance gaps and the San José Sharks have emerged as an unlikely civic partner — from arena tenant to park steward and space activator. That kind of cross-sector work was evident at other sites, as well. San Pedro Square is a vibrant pedestrian zone that emerged during the pandemic when the city temporarily closed the street to vehicles in order to boost outdoor dining.

Now permanently closed to cars, San Pedro Square blends history, culture, food and walkability and lowers the barrier to participation for small vendors and businesses. The bustling food hall in the adjacent 1874 Farmers Union building serves as an anchor of continuity while drawing in customers.

At SoFA Pocket Park, a drab concrete parking lot has been transformed into a charming and lovingly maintained garden that is privately owned and publicly activated, with Veggielution working alongside We Start Gardens and members of San José’s Black community as stewards. Shawn Gerth, executive director of Veggielution, called the community garden a place to not just grow food but to introduce people to positive experiences with nature and to teach food sovereignty.

Piecing together the disparate parts of the city’s urban core has led to creative solutions. From a public art project using physical painted sharks on sidewalks and digital sharks as wayfinding, to the underpass activation guiding visitors to Little Italy, the city’s Stitching Districts project advances a cohesive vision of the downtown heart through a nimble, cost-efficient way to tie nodes of activity together across a community.

During a jam-packed year of large events for San José (from the Super Bowl being held in nearby Santa Clara to March Madness NCAA games to the FIFA World Cup) cross-agency coordination has been both the challenge and the emerging norm.

“Temporary momentum only matters if it leads to permanent value,” Mulcahy noted. Fortunately, the perspective the city has taken on the real value proposition of major events is to enable better things: safer streets, activated parks and stronger neighborhood connections as lasting changes.

Progress based on past and present

The Studio revealed a city that’s drawing on its history and sense of place to create public spaces for people to feel belonging and connected to, even amid Silicon Valley’s breakneck growth.

San José is serving as a laboratory for belonging at scale — diverse, economically stratified, thinking creatively across silos and building a future where all its communities thrive together.

As Supervisor Duong put it, San José shows that “a welcoming community can feel big but small at the same time,” she said. “Every corner is home, every person has a story.”

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

In the Heart of Silicon Valley, San José Is Building Belonging was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Think about the last time you felt genuine joy in a public space. Maybe it was taking in a World Cup game with others in a public square, the sound of live music drifting across a park or the surprise of stumbling across a new piece of public art in your neighborhood. Whatever it was, you probably went back. And you probably told someone about it.

That instinct — to return to places where we felt good, and to bring others with us — turns out to be more than a pleasant habit. A growing body of knowledge suggests that joy is one of the most powerful forces available to the people who design, operate and program public spaces.

This is not a frivolous pursuit. Serious researchers are producing peer-reviewed science that is starting to show how joy is a potent way to improve health and create social connection. At Reimagining the Civic Commons, we are big believers that public space has the potential to deliver significant social and economic benefits — and this growing body of research suggests that creating the conditions for joy may be one of the most effective strategies for achieving outcomes that benefit people and communities.

What is joy?

First, it is helpful to understand how this research defines the emotion of joy. Four key characteristics emerge from the literature:

Distinct from happiness. Joy is more intense and more fleeting than happiness. While happiness is a stable state tied to overall life satisfaction, joy often arises spontaneously, even amid hardship.

Often triggered by specific events. Researchers have confirmed that joy is a discrete emotional state, separate from gratitude, contentment, and interest and is often a response to something welcomed or unexpected.

Physiologically beneficial. Positive emotional states like joy have been shown to biologically induce the markers of improved health.

Rooted in connection and meaning. Joy tends to arise in social contexts, moments of accomplishment, or experiences tied to something larger than oneself.

What joy can do

The physical health case for joy is substantial. Joy and other positive emotions are linked to lower stress hormones, including reduced cortisol, as well as lower blood pressure and reduced cardiovascular risk. The benefits extend to immune function, too — the positive affect of strong emotions like joy is associated with a stronger immune response, and people who experience more positive emotions tend to live longer.

The mental health benefits are just as significant. Positive emotions act as a buffer against depression and anxiety, and even something as simple as a short, joy-focused intervention has been shown to improve sleep quality.

Joy’s effects don’t stop with the individual; they ripple outward into the community. Research tracking happiness through real-world social networks found that it spreads up to three degrees of separation, meaning one person’s happiness can lift the mood of people they’ve never even met. Experiencing intense emotions like joy in the company of other people has been shown to increase the intensity of those feelings and increase social connection. And perhaps most importantly, the benefits of joy impact disadvantaged groups most, which makes investing in joyful public space a meaningful lever for health equity.

Five implications for public space

Public space managers cannot manufacture joy, but they can create the conditions for it. Here’s how:

Create micro-moments. The Big Joy Project found that small, brief acts like marveling at a sunset, sharing a laugh with a friend or inspecting a beautiful flower produced meaningful wellbeing changes in just one week. This is a powerful message for public space: you don’t need a major festival or capital investment to generate joy. In Portland, Oregon, the Multnomah County Library’s “Read to the Dogs” program captures this principle perfectly. Families register their kids for an appointment to read aloud to a certified therapy dog — Tater Tot, in this case — for just 15 minutes at a time, alone or with a sibling or friend. There’s no admission fee or special equipment, just a volunteer, a trained dog, and a library that already exists. The genius of the program is its low barrier to entry and high potential for joy: a single 15-minute session is enough to lower a child’s anxiety around reading, build confidence and turn a routine library visit into something genuinely joyful.

Make joy contagious. Research shows that positive emotions are contagious and that social activities, when done together, create social bonds. Sociologists have a term for what happens when large groups gather and share an intense collective experience: collective effervescence, a concept coined by Émile Durkheim to describe the heightened energy and sense of unity that emerges when people come together around a shared purpose or emotion. Anyone who has watched a World Cup match in a public park this summer — with strangers leaping to their feet, embracing, groaning in unison — has felt it firsthand. Public spaces are among the few places left in civic life where collective effervescence can happen spontaneously, if public space managers think about how to spark it.

The Longest Table is a national program and an example of everyday collective effervescence that can spread. It brings neighbors together around shared meals in more than 30 cities across the country, from parks and schoolyards to blocked-off streets and library plazas. It was founded in 2022 on a deceptively simple premise — that putting a long table in a public space and filling it with food and an open invitation is enough to make something real happen. Each event is locally organized, free to attend, and deliberately free of speeches or agendas, a large-scale enactment of what the research confirms: that sharing a meal with strangers is one of the most reliable ways to build the social bonds that hold communities together.

For instance, The Longest Table Akron, a local version of the community potluck, was hosted earlier this year at Lock 3 Park in downtown Akron, Ohio. Long tables stretched along the sidewalk above Lock 3 on downtown’s Main Street, and anyone — with a dish to share or simply curiosity to bring — could take a seat. Table Hosts coordinated small groups, a Community Table offered shared abundance to anyone who arrived empty-handed, and strangers who might never otherwise have met ended up sitting side by side over casseroles, salads and homemade lemonade.

The design choice that matters most here is visibility: the tables aren’t tucked away, but laid out in the open, in full public view, where the sight of a packed, lively table becomes its own, joyous invitation.

Engage the senses. Sensory- and nature-rich environments have been shown to reduce blood pressure and stress hormones within 15 minutes, a state that is a useful precondition for joy. Gatton Park’s BLOOM exhibition in Lexington, Kentucky, offers a vivid example of this sensory design that impacts emotion. Peonies, an installation by French art and design collective TILT, anchors the exhibition with a series of 20-foot-tall peony sculptures arranged across a lawn. By day, the blooms read as elegant, oversized white flowers; by night, they transform entirely, animated by dynamic light sequences that turn the lawn into a living artwork. Circular seating built into the base of each sculpture invites visitors to sit within the piece itself, turning a visual spectacle into a full-bodied, lingering experience. It’s a clear demonstration of the research: when a space engages multiple senses at once — scale, light, color, texture, even the physical sensation of sitting inside the art — it produces a more powerful and memorable response.

Encourage prosocial behavior, and make it fun. Voluntary actions designed to help others end up helping the people doing the actions — they feel meaningful, and help people experience greater overall happiness. Two examples from different parts of the country show what this means in practice.

In Philadelphia, Love Your Park Week brings together more than 100 parks and 140 volunteer-led “Park Friends” groups each May for a citywide week of tree planting, litter cleanup and garden care. These activities are anchored by a signature event that pairs the work itself with food, music and kids’ activities, turning a park maintenance day into a neighborhood celebration.

In San José last May, following Mayor Mike Mahan’s State of the City address at Guadalupe River Park, hundreds of residents gathered to remove litter and debris from the park, aiding in restoring the area’s natural beauty and improving the perception of safety among park visitors. Others helped plant trees and vegetation, cleaned up the riverbed and painted murals on bridges and utility boxes. And these “days of care” have become not just one-off events, but a regular occurrence. This kind of collective stewardship for a shared place can become the occasion for joy — visitors leave not just having improved a park, but having spent a morning with neighbors, strangers and family, the kind of prosocial contribution the research links to deeper and more durable wellbeing.

Prioritize those who need it most. Investments in joyful activities matter most in under-resourced communities, where research shows the benefits are greatest. In Detroit’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, the Civic Commons team worked to redevelop 26 vacant parcels of land into Ella Fitzgerald Park. As they did so, they provided mini-grants to local residents to develop and host community-led programming. One grant went to a resident who created “Hula Hoops and Bubbles” — an activity so popular it led to the formation of a neighborhood hula hoop troupe that sets up regularly at the park and at public spaces throughout the neighborhood to this day. These small investments in residents produced an outsized return: they became the mechanism for genuine co-creation and joyful, lasting community connection.

What happens when we get this right?

People often return to places where they feel good. That’s the simplest version of the case for joy: it’s a way to connect people to a place, and to each other.

But the implications run deeper. Because joy is contagious, a community with reliably joyful public spaces quietly improves the mood, health and resilience of people throughout its social networks, including those who never visit at all. Joy is not an impractical addition to the public space mission — it is one of the most powerful tools we have for building healthier, more connected and more inclusive communities. And unlike many of the forces that shape community wellbeing, joy is something we can actually achieve in public space, in everyday moments and existing spaces, starting now.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of the JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.

The Case for Joy was originally published in Reimagining the Civic Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.