Reframing the Social in 2025 – Why Community Design Still Matters

In 2019, I wrote a research report called Designing the Social by Placemaking and Identity for the 21st Century. It was born from a series of questions that seemed urgent at the time: How do we design cities and systems that foster belonging? What makes a place meaningful beyond its function? And, crucially, how can design influence the way we live together—not just beside one another?

That was before a global pandemic redefined what community meant. Before “remote” became the norm, and before design—spatial, digital, and systemic—was thrust into the role of crisis manager. The questions haven't changed, but the context has. In many ways, the world caught up to the conversation.

Five years later, the core tension persists: we’re more digitally connected than ever, yet increasingly socially fragmented. Our cities are getting smarter, but not always more humane. This blog series revisits the original research and reframes its ideas through today’s lens—where AI is shaping planning, where loneliness is treated as a public health crisis, and where the need for meaningful, equitable design has never been more critical.

The Digital Acceleration Dilemma

In 2019, we were already talking about exponential data creation, networked systems, and the Internet of Things as forces reshaping social and spatial experience. Today, that acceleration has only intensified. Smart cities, generative AI, platform-driven design, and ambient surveillance are no longer speculative—they’re operational. But in many cases, their integration has moved faster than our ability to ask whether these technologies serve people or simply optimize systems.

We've seen the rise of hyperconnected infrastructure—tools designed to predict behavior, automate public services, and mediate nearly every aspect of civic life. Yet alongside that connectivity, public trust in institutions has declined, social isolation has surged, and urban spaces feel increasingly transactional rather than relational.

This is the paradox: technology has never been more capable of connecting us, yet we feel increasingly disconnected. In the rush to digitize experience, have we sacrificed the subtle cues of place, context, and belonging that shape truly resilient communities?

In my original report, I referenced the concept of the “fitness gap”—the mismatch between a system’s design and the human context it’s meant to serve. That gap has only widened. Today, we see it in cities designed more for data collection than dialogue. In digital platforms built for scale, not intimacy. And in smart environments that optimize movement, but not meaning.

For city builders, designers, and planners, the task is no longer about whether to integrate technology—but how to do it with intention. We must shift from efficiency to empathy, from optimization to orientation—toward systems that help people feel seen, rooted, and included.

Why Community Is Still the Future

Despite the layers of digital infrastructure we’ve added to our lives, one truth remains unchanged: humans are relational beings. We need each other—not just in Slack threads and city dashboards, but in physical, embodied, lived space. The question isn’t whether we want to belong—it’s whether our environments are designed to support that need.

Back in 2019, I worked with Human Hotel in Copenhagen, a co-living platform grounded in the idea of “meaningful meetings.” Unlike transactional models like Airbnb, Human Hotel focused on shared values, mutual hosting, and intentional connection. This idea—designing for quality over quantity—felt almost radical at the time. Now, it feels essential.

The challenges of the past five years—pandemic isolation, housing crises, climate anxiety—have prompted a renewed interest in community models that prioritize shared resources, collaborative living, and localized care. We’re seeing this play out in new co-housing experiments, in mutual aid networks, and in the way city planners are rethinking public space as social infrastructure, not just a backdrop.

Designers and planners are beginning to ask better questions:

• What kind of social behavior does this space encourage?
• How can technology support—not replace—human relationships?
• Where is the threshold between convenience and connection?

Community, when intentionally cultivated, becomes a form of infrastructure. It's a support system that scales horizontally, not vertically—a counterbalance to top-down systems that often fail to see the nuance of local realities. The shift from “smart city” to “caring city” is slow, but it’s happening—in shared gardens, in neighborhood repair cafes, in public libraries reimagined as civic living rooms.

In short: the future isn’t just tech-enabled. It’s people-centered. And designers have a critical role in making that future not only possible, but livable.

The “Fourth Place” and Designing Belonging

In traditional urban theory, we talk about the first place (home), second place (work), and third places (cafés, libraries, parks—those semi-public zones that nurture informal connection). But as our lives have become increasingly hybrid—digitally mediated, physically dispersed—a new layer has emerged: what some call the fourth place.

The “fourth place” is neither fully physical nor entirely digital. It’s an in-between realm where communities gather in ephemeral ways—Slack channels with civic intentions, popup events in unused retail spaces, group chats that drive real-world action. In my original report, I pointed to this blurring of boundaries as a design opportunity. Today, it’s a design imperative.

As city planners and designers, we can no longer assume that place is fixed or that connection is inherently local. But we also can’t outsource meaning to the cloud. If we want to build lasting, resilient communities, we need to ask: How do people move through space—not just logistically, but emotionally? Where do they feel seen, safe, and engaged?

This is where placemaking becomes essential. Not as beautification, but as social choreography—designing the conditions for interaction, serendipity, and belonging. A well-placed bench, a flexible public square, a program that turns underused land into community commons—these interventions aren’t just aesthetic. They’re invitations.

We’re seeing designers embrace this thinking globally:

• In Barcelona’s superblocks, where cars are limited and civic life flourishes.
• In Vancouver’s laneway housing and parklets, which reclaim overlooked spaces.
• In São Paulo’s temporary street takeovers, driven by communities rather than planners.

At the same time, fourth-place thinking asks us to design for inclusivity across bandwidths—ensuring digital and physical spaces are not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. As AI reshapes communication and cities digitize their services, the design challenge isn’t to create frictionless systems. It’s to create systems that invite reflection, interaction, and care.

Designing belonging today means designing not just for access, but for meaningful participation—in space, in community, and in the narratives we build together.

Reconciliation and Indigenous Knowledge in Community Design

Looking back on the original 2019 report, a significant gap becomes clear: the absence of Indigenous voices in research - ways of knowing, being, and relating to place. Any conversation about placemaking, identity, and social systems—especially on lands shaped by colonial legacies—must include Indigenous perspectives not as an add-on, but as foundational.

Indigenous communities have long understood what western planning has only recently begun to rediscover: that land is not a resource, but a relationship. That knowledge lives in place. That community is not simply a cluster of dwellings, but a living, reciprocal system of care, ceremony, and shared responsibility.

In the context of canadian cities—and cities globally that occupy Indigenous territories—designers and planners have a responsibility to move beyond symbolic gestures toward active reconciliation. This means:

• Centering Indigenous voices in community consultation.
• Applying Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk): a Mi’kmaq framework that combines Western and Indigenous knowledge systems for balanced understanding.
• Re-framing land use and development through stewardship, not ownership.
• Honouring Indigenous place-names, stories, and practices as living parts of the urban fabric.

Reconciliation isn’t just a political mandate—it’s a design principle. It calls us to recognize that the systems we build reflect the values we embed. If we’re designing for belonging, we must ask: Belonging to whom? And on whose terms?

Embedding Indigenous ways of knowing into design practice is about truth, justice, and creating space for many worldviews to shape the future together. With this comes understanding how we engage with Indigenous communities and the learning that comes with that.

Designing Forward, Together

In an era where cities compete to be the smartest, fastest, and most efficient, we’re reminded—now more than ever—that true resilience begins with relationships. The technologies we build, the systems we design, and the places we shape all reflect deeper questions: Who feels welcome here? Whose voices are centered? What kind of future are we designing toward?

This blog series is a continuation and a reimagining of the work I began in 2019. It’s an invitation to slow down, revisit the fundamentals of human connection, and update our design thinking with the complexity, nuance, and urgency that 2025 demands.

As we move through this series, we’ll explore how placemaking, identity, and systems thinking can be tools for healing—not just efficiency. We’ll look critically at the digital layers reshaping our cities, but also ground ourselves in place—especially in the places we occupy that hold histories of displacement, resistance, and renewal.

Because designing the social isn’t just about improving cities. It’s about restoring relationships—to one another, to land, to culture, and to the possibilities we can only unlock when we imagine together.