Designing for Real Life
Creating Cities That Support the Rhythms of Everyday Human Experience
At coLARGE, we believe cities should reflect how people live, not how we've historically planned them. Connection, learning, and working aren’t separate activities. They overlap constantly in our daily lives. So why do our cities divide them into isolated zones: housing here, education there, work somewhere else?
In our previous blog Cities Beyond Buildings, we explored why urban planning must start with people, not just infrastructure. In this post, we dig deeper, how can cities respond more effectively to human motivation and needs by embracing the interconnectedness of how we connect, learn, and work?
Striving for better
We exist in various states and stages throughout our lives, but one constant seems to be the innate impulse we have within us to improve ourselves and the world around us. There is a deep urge within most people to leave the world in a better state than when they arrived in it.
The desire for improvement and growth can stem from several factors but typically such goals are powered by three main daily aspects of our lives.
Connection is a basic human need, it is our need to feel rooted in a community, a sense of belonging and being part of something bigger than ourselves.
Learning does not stop at the school gate or the university lecture hall. It happens informally, in community projects, in peer networks, in shared experimentation but also crucially in the workplace.
Working today is not just about productivity. It is also about collaboration, meaning, and contribution, often blending seamlessly with how we connect with each other and how we learn.
Connection, Learning & Working - a fluid process
Each one of these is a clear fundamental aspect in our lived experience. To truly grow we need to allow each of these aspects space to grow within ourselves. When connection, learning and working overlap, support and feed of each other we can access richer levels of growth and development. Only when these aspects are in harmony does one truly grow and evolve in a resilient and sustainable way.
Work without any learning is stagnant and doomed to a lack of professional development. Connection without work gives rise to a sense of unfulfillment, lack of direction and loss of self-worth. While both working and learning without embracing connection creates narrow focus, detachment, a loss of human connection and dissociation with wider society.
By recognising that these states are not fixed, even though they may have certain emphasis at certain stages or milestones in our lives (learning more so when at school, college and university) they are fluid and adaptable and during our lives as we fluctuate between them, helping us develop and evolve in rounded ways.
These three forces, connection, learning, and working, are not separate elements that we move between. They are interwoven aspects of human life. When they align, we grow. When they are isolated, we stagnate and become stuck in a rut. Cities that ignore this reality risk designing for functions, and for not people or their needs.
Cultivating the Overlap - Community, Academia and Business
Just as we grow richer from the overlaps between connection, learning and working so too can our cites, by nurturing connections and collaborations between Communities, Academia and Businesses we can do the same within our cites.
Each one of these physical elements is the most recognisable and clearest parallel of the experiential aspects, so by creating new and innovative overlaps between them we can create new overlap between connection, learning and working in a physical format.
Community brings lived experience, local intelligence, social resilience and generational and demographic diversity and multiple viewpoints. It allows for rich connections to occur in our lives.
Academia brings rigorous inquiry, future thinking, and research resources and the passion and energy of students to solve problems. The academic system allows us to engage with knowledge transfer and determine our interests and passions.
Business brings agility, investment, and operational knowledge and the ability to bring ideas to practical fruition. Business can often allow a personal expression of purpose and sense of value.
When these forces interact, not in isolation, but intentionally woven together to work together they can create ecosystems that are far more dynamic and sustainable than any user, owner or sector could build alone. When we blur the traditional lines between these spheres, we unlock new forms of opportunity in the city and new forms of personal, social and professional growth for ourselves. This becomes true interdisciplinary innovation, an approach that can transform our cites into living labs.
What if…
A Neighbourhood could become a hub of innovation and research.
A School could become an engine of local entrepreneurship.
An Office could become a space for community connection.
Rich Ecosystems
Cites that overlap these uses together will naturally foster rich ecosystems between the users, groups and people who use their facilities. Collaboration between communities, academia and businesses will build so much more than buildings but also importantly co-created initiatives, programmes and strategies that will aim to tackle real world problems.
Some examples of such ecosystem could be:
Universities partnering with street markets to innovate circular economy models to help communities and businesses become more sustainable.
Local businesses co-designing public spaces with communities, organised via engagement sessions facilitated by students.
Makerspaces hosting students, entrepreneurs, and residents’ side-by-side to create locally inspired innovation and new start-ups.
Right now, the challenges our cities face, such as climate change, growing economic inequality and technological disruption, to name but a few are too complex for siloed solutions or single actors.
We should be thinking about how to use the urban environment itself to help solve some of societies big problems by rethinking how we see the infrastructure and places of the city and how they interact with each other.
If we want better cities, we must design for the whole person, not just their housing not just their education and not just their job, but for how these all aspects play out, every day, in every neighbourhood and every place.
We need spaces, models, and cultures that embrace complexity, experimentation, and shared ownership to inspire real growth and progress.
The challenges cities face, such as climate change, inequality, disconnection/isolation, cannot be solved in silos. We need to design urban life around what truly drives people, their motivations and their desires.
At coLARGE, we believe that cities are not just places to connect, learn, or work but places where these aspects overlap, evolve, and inspire. That iss why we:
Prototype before we plan
Collaborate across disciplines
See every interaction as a seed of systemic change
When connection, learning, and working align, people thrive, and so too can our cities.
