Cities
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961
Wellbeing Infrastructure Lab
How do we design cities, organisations and societies where people actually flourish?
An intellectual home for a body of work in progress, a manifesto, a growing archive of essays, and a reading room around four fundamental questions. A practice, not a product.
Four lines of inquiry
The lab holds four questions in parallel.
01
How do we design cities where people flourish?
Not simply cities that function, but cities that enable connection, movement, health, beauty and belonging. Third places, water, walkability, public space, culture, nature, ageing, urban wellbeing.
WHO, Healthy Cities Programme →02
How do we build organisations where people thrive?
Not simply productive workplaces, but organisations where performance and human wellbeing reinforce one another. Leadership, trust, culture, psychological safety, purpose, burnout, the future of work.
WHO, Guidelines on Mental Health at Work (2022) →03
How do we rebuild the social fabric?
How we create trust, belonging and resilience in increasingly fragmented societies. Loneliness, civic life, democracy, intergenerational solidarity, community, institutions.
EU JRC, Loneliness in the European Union →04
How do we cultivate the inner conditions for flourishing?
The personal foundations that make outer transformation possible. Leading without armour, attention, wonder, resilience, meaning, wisdom, lifelong learning.
OECD, Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being →Each question sits on a foundation of public evidence. These are starting points from bodies whose work the lab reads carefully, WHO, OECD, and the European Commission.
Manifesto
What lies beneath.
infra- (Latin) below, beneath · structura (Latin) a building, an arrangement, a way things are put together.
- 01
Infrastructure. From the Latin infra, below, beneath, and structura, a building, an arrangement, a way things are put together. Infrastructure is what lies beneath. The layer you do not see until it fails. Pipes, cables, foundations, roads. Take it away and the visible world collapses into a heap of intentions.
- 02
Wellbeing is infrastructure in exactly this sense. Not a perk, a campaign or a spa weekend. It is the unseen substrate beneath any city, organisation or society that intends to last. When it is working, no one notices. When it is missing, everything above it strains.
- 03
What lies beneath a flourishing life is rarely private. Beneath the individual is the family; beneath the family, the street; beneath the street, the neighbourhood; beneath that, the institutions, the economy, the climate. Wellbeing is what happens when those layers are sound. Illbeing is what leaks up when they are not.
- 04
We inherited cities designed for extraction and organisations designed for output. Both were engineered around a machine, not a human. We are paying the interest on that design debt in loneliness, burnout, mistrust and disengagement, the visible cracks of an invisible foundation.
- 05
Flourishing is not an individual achievement against the odds. No amount of optimisation, apps, retreats, supplements, will compensate for environments that erode us by default. If the container is broken, the water leaks no matter how carefully you pour.
- 06
The third place, not home, not work, is one of the load-bearing beams beneath a civic life. Cafés, baths, plazas, libraries, barbershops, parks: neutral ground, levelling by design, conversation as the main event, regulars setting the tone. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg named the pattern in 1989. We have been dismantling these places for four decades. They must be rebuilt, deliberately, at scale.
- 07
Organisations are third places too, or they are nothing. A workplace that only extracts labour and returns a salary is a transactional space. A workplace that also returns meaning, belonging and restoration is infrastructure for a life.
- 08
Design for the nervous system, not only the balance sheet. The body keeps the score of every meeting, every commute, every fluorescent light. Wellbeing metrics belong on the same page as financial ones, or the financial ones will eventually fail.
- 09
Beauty is not decoration. It is a public-health intervention. Water, light, greenery, silence, warmth, these are not luxuries. They are the minimum viable environment for a human to be well.
- 10
Leadership without armour is the leadership this work requires. You cannot design flourishing environments from a defended posture. Coherence between what you build and how you live is the only credible currency.
- 11
This is not soft. It is the hardest infrastructure question of our century: can we design places, institutions and economies where humans, and the planet that hosts them, actually thrive?
- 12
The Wellbeing Infrastructure Lab is where that question is held, in essays, in research, in built projects, in conversation. A practice of tending to what lies beneath. You are welcome to join it.
The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the official position of Therme Group or any affiliated organisation.
A proposition
The Connection Prescription.
Loneliness is now recognised by the WHO and the US Surgeon General as a public-health emergency, with mortality effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The EU's own Joint Research Centre reports that roughly one in eight Europeans feels lonely most of the time.
The lab's proposition is simple: treat connection the way we treat clean water. Not as a mood, not as a private problem, as infrastructure a city or an employer is expected to provide.
01
A third place within a fifteen-minute walk
A public, free-to-enter, socially mixed space, bath, library, plaza, garden, treated as a planning obligation, not an amenity.
02
A connection audit for every workplace
Alongside financial and safety reporting, organisations disclose one measure: how often colleagues have unhurried, undirected contact with each other.
03
Strangers' Table
A monthly, hosted, no-agenda gathering the lab is prototyping, protocol-based, twelve seats, mixed generations, one long meal. Open-sourced so any city, employer or neighbour can run one.
04
A wellbeing line on the balance sheet
A shared, comparable indicator, a connection density index, that cities and companies can publish alongside GDP, revenue and emissions.
A proposition in development. Comments, critiques and collaborators welcome.
Essays
The essays under Leading without armour are the first body of work in this lab, the inner infrastructure half of the practice.
The Reading Room
The people I return to when the question gets bigger than me.
Shelf · Foundational
Foundational · 1989
The Great Good Place
Ray Oldenburg
The founding text on third places and civic life.
The Great Good Place
Ray Oldenburg
Foundational · 1961
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
How cities host, or destroy, the conditions for human flourishing.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
Foundational · 1977
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
Design patterns for places that make people feel alive.
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
Shelf · Wellbeing & the body
Wellbeing & the body · 2014
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
Why the nervous system must be part of any design conversation.
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
Wellbeing & the body · 2018
Lost Connections
Johann Hari
Depression and disconnection as environmental problems, not only chemical ones.
Lost Connections
Johann Hari
Wellbeing & the body · 2022
The Myth of Normal
Gabor Maté
On the toxic environments a culture normalises.
The Myth of Normal
Gabor Maté
Shelf · Cities & public life
Cities & public life · 2010
Cities for People
Jan Gehl
The human-scale city as public health infrastructure.
Cities for People
Jan Gehl
Cities & public life · 2013
Happy City
Charles Montgomery
Urban design and the science of human wellbeing.
Happy City
Charles Montgomery
Cities & public life · 2018
Palaces for the People
Eric Klinenberg
Social infrastructure as the invisible scaffolding of trust.
Palaces for the People
Eric Klinenberg
Shelf · Belonging & social cohesion
Belonging & social cohesion · 2020
Together
Vivek Murthy
Loneliness as a public health emergency, and connection as prescription.
Together
Vivek Murthy
Belonging & social cohesion · 2022
Belonging
Geoff Mulgan
Trust, identity and cohesion as things a society can deliberately build.
Belonging
Geoff Mulgan
Shelf · Organisations & leadership
Organisations & leadership · 2014
Reinventing Organizations
Frederic Laloux
Workplaces built for wholeness, not extraction.
Reinventing Organizations
Frederic Laloux
Organisations & leadership · 2018
Dare to Lead
Brené Brown
Leadership without armour, in her language.
Dare to Lead
Brené Brown
Organisations & leadership · 2023
Build the Life You Want
Arthur C. Brooks & Oprah Winfrey
Happiness as an operating system, not a mood.
Build the Life You Want
Arthur C. Brooks & Oprah Winfrey
Shelf · Wellbeing economics & policy
Wellbeing economics & policy · 2017
Wellbeing Economy
Lorenzo Fioramonti
Rethinking economic success beyond GDP, through the lens of human flourishing.
Wellbeing Economy
Lorenzo Fioramonti
Shelf · Institutional signals
Institutional signals
Urban Health & Wellbeing Programme
World Health Organization
The global public-health case for wellbeing infrastructure.
Urban Health & Wellbeing Programme
World Health Organization
Institutional signals · 2022
Guidelines on Mental Health at Work
World Health Organization
The first global standard on protecting mental health in the workplace.
Guidelines on Mental Health at Work
World Health Organization
Institutional signals
Better Life Index
OECD
Measuring what actually matters, at the country level.
Better Life Index
OECD
Institutional signals · 2013
Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being
OECD
The methodological backbone for national wellbeing measurement.
Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being
OECD
Institutional signals
World Cities Report
UN Habitat
The state of urban flourishing, globally.
World Cities Report
UN Habitat
Institutional signals
Loneliness in the European Union
EU Joint Research Centre
The first EU-wide evidence base on loneliness as a policy issue.
Loneliness in the European Union
EU Joint Research Centre
Institutional signals
Wellness Economy Monitor
Global Wellness Institute
The scale of the wellbeing economy as a category.
Wellness Economy Monitor
Global Wellness Institute
A subsection of the lab
Wellbeing Manufaktur.
A workshop in the old sense of the word, Manufaktur, a place where things are made by hand, with care, one at a time. Where the ideas of the lab take physical form: objects to hold, kits to teach with, rooms to gather in, prints to live with.
01
Print shop
Signed prints of quotes and passages from Leading without armour. Small runs, considered paper, gold detail. The first offer of the Manufaktur.
02
Workshops
Half-day and full-day formats for leaders, teams and civic groups, leading without armour, designing third places, the connection audit. In-person, small groups.
03
Educational kits
Card decks, facilitation guides and reading dossiers for schools, universities and municipalities that want to run the lab's inquiries themselves.
04
Exhibitions & design objects
Travelling exhibitions and one-off design objects, commissioned with artists and makers, that let a public encounter the manifesto through the senses, not only the page.
The Manufaktur is opening in stages. Prints first; workshops and kits to follow. Write in if you would like to collaborate, host, commission or book a session.
The Card Catalogue
The lab thinks alongside a chorus.
A wall of catalogue cards from the urbanists, sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists whose work the lab builds on, filed, not framed.
Urban design
“First life, then spaces, then buildings, the other way around never works.”
Jan Gehl
Cities for People
Third places
“Third places exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality.”
Ray Oldenburg
The Great Good Place
Social fabric
“Social infrastructure is the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops.”
Eric Klinenberg
Palaces for the People
Neuroscience
“The body keeps the score.”
Bessel van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score
Wellbeing
“Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”
Robert Waldinger
Harvard Study of Adult Development
Positive psychology
“Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”
Martin Seligman
Flourish
Leadership
“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
Brené Brown
Dare to Lead
Public health
“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling, it harms both individual and societal health.”
Vivek H. Murthy
Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, U.S. Surgeon General Advisory, 2023
Belonging
“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”
Johann Hari
Lost Connections
Health & environment
“Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.”
Gabor Maté
The Myth of Normal
Social cohesion
“Belonging is not a soft, secondary human need. It is fundamental, as vital as food and shelter.”
Geoff Mulgan
Belonging
Wellbeing economics
“GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Robert F. Kennedy
Address at the University of Kansas, 1968
A living catalogue. Suggestions, additions and corrections are welcome, write in below.
Why a lab, and why now
Wellbeing is on its way to becoming the defining infrastructure question of this century, the way sanitation was in the nineteenth and connectivity was in the twentieth.
This lab is where the intellectual case is built, in public, one essay and one collaboration at a time. If your work touches cities, organisations, culture, health or policy, you are welcome to read along, and to write in.