What does it mean to design an inclusive city? Is it about adding more benches, planting trees, or creating bike lanes? While these elements matter, InclusiveCity reminds us that inclusion begins with the relationships that form between people and places. Urban planning is often framed as a technical process, but our project shows that it is also relational work – slow, attentive, and grounded in care.
Across Europe, cities are experimenting with participatory approaches to public space design. Yet participation is not a simple checkbox. It is a living process that requires empathy, flexibility, and the willingness to question ingrained assumptions. At the heart of the project are five Urban Living Labs in Oslo, Vienna, Budapest, Rotterdam, and Rome. These are not only places to test ideas but spaces where trust is built, where emotions and memories resurface, and where communities shape narratives about their neighbourhoods. They remind us that public space is not only physical – public space is also social, emotional, and deeply personal.
A Reflective Pause at Placemaking Week Europe
This perspective shaped the session we hosted at Placemaking Week Europe 2025 in Reggio Emilia: Urban Reflective Pauses: Centering Care and Inclusion in Placemaking. We wanted to create a moment of stillness inside a week full of activity. The room was arranged softly, with pillows, blankets, and warm lighting, inviting participants to slow down and arrive with their full attention.
We began not with slides but with a guided reflective pause. This meditation invited everyone to think about their own practice: Who do you imagine when preparing an activity? Who do you expect to show up? How do your decisions – timing, tone, language – shape who feels welcome? What does inclusion mean in the body, not just on paper?
During the meditation, scenes from our partner cities appeared as gentle prompts: memories shared by seniors along Vienna’s Donaukanal; stories about safety from Oslo; the energy and impatience of youth in Rotterdam; the collaborative improvisation of students and neighbours building a pop-up installation in Budapest; the persistence of community groups in Rome advocating for their neighbourhood. These weren’t described as case studies, but as atmospheres – small windows into the lived realities behind the project.
One participant described this beginning as a rare moment of calm in an otherwise intense week, a pause that opened “a different level of groundedness” from which conversations could unfold.
After returning slowly from the meditation, participants gathered in small groups to explore themes closely tied to our work: care in facilitation, emotional safety, youth engagement, and the contradictions that often accompany inclusion.
Some discussed how facilitators hold space for diverse needs – when to adapt, when to stay with the moment instead of following a script. Others reflected on safety as something relational rather than simply physical. Another group spoke about youth participation and the tension between quick changes and long planning timelines. Across the tables, people shared uncertainties, frustrations, and small stories that rarely surface in fast-paced workshops.
These conversations didn’t aim for solutions. Instead, they created a shared space where the realities of participatory work could be acknowledged: the emotional labour behind facilitation, the fragility of inclusion, the pressures to produce outcomes, and the gaps that appear between institutional expectations and community rhythms. Participants recognised how easily processes can become overwhelming or symbolic, even with good intentions.
In this sense, the reflective pause did not simply calm the room – it made space for honesty. It allowed practitioners to speak not only about methods but about experiences, fears, contradictions, and the subtle cues that influence whether people feel safe, welcome, or overlooked
What This Reveals About Inclusive Placemaking
The session highlighted a truth that runs through all of InclusiveCity’s work: inclusion is not automatic. It is fragile, relational, and shaped as much by behaviour and atmosphere as by design. A process that appears welcoming can still feel intimidating; a carefully prepared activity can still exclude those who do not see themselves reflected in it.
What emerged in Reggio Emilia mirrors what we continuously encounter in our project: care is not just an emotion – it is a practice. It requires attention to what is unspoken and embodied, to the subtle dynamics that influence whether people feel safe, acknowledged, or hesitant to participate. It asks practitioners to move at different rhythms, to stay with uncertainty, and to hold space for contradictions rather than smoothing them out.
This also means confronting the tensions built into participatory planning. Institutions often value speed and clarity, while communities need time, slowness, and trust. Youth seek quick, visible change; older adults carry memories and physical limits; newcomers face linguistic and cultural barriers; those with difficult histories bring them into the space. Care challenges us to work with these differences rather than simplify them.
Across our InclusiveCity contexts, we see how stories, emotions, and everyday practices shape public space just as much as physical form. Whether through moments of intergenerational memory, insights about safety, the creativity of young people, or small acts of cooperation, these experiences reveal the emotional and relational infrastructures that often remain invisible.
They remind us that inclusive placemaking is not only about designing new spaces, but about noticing and nurturing the connections, needs, and vulnerabilities that already exist within them. Care becomes a guiding principle—not to soften the work, but to make it more honest, grounded, and capable of supporting truly inclusive urban futures.
A Closing Thought
Our session in Reggio Emilia offered a brief pause – a reminder that care begins with awareness and the willingness to adapt. By slowing down together, we created a space where people could reconnect with their intentions, recognise their impact, and reflect on how they show up in community processes.
As we continue with InclusiveCity, we hope to carry this reflective quality into our methods and debates. Designing inclusive cities is not only a technical task; it is relational work that unfolds in the ways we listen, the atmospheres we create, and the attention we bring to each other.
When we design with care – not just for communities, but alongside them – we begin to co-create public spaces that feel not only livable, but deeply human.
Extra: Participant Reflection
By Stephanie Hápp
During Placemaking Europe Week 2025 in Reggio Emilia, I joined the InclusiveCity Team for their session, and it left a deep impression on me. What struck me immediately was how unusually—at least for a typical urban-planning context—the session began with a guided group meditation. What made it even more special was that, throughout the meditation, the team gently introduced and hinted at their projects. We were invited, for example, to imagine swimming in the Danube Canal in Vienna or listening closely to the sounds of water. It was incredibly calming and offered a completely new approach to workshops for me.
After some time, we were slowly brought out of the meditation and paired up for a short exchange. Then, several guiding questions and themes were presented, and each participant joined the group that resonated most. I chose the one focused on:
How do we bring care into our facilitation?
When have you let embodied needs guide the process rather than a script?
Can you recall a moment when your care as a facilitator changed how people engaged or chose to share?
I felt strongly drawn to this group, not least because I facilitate community dance sessions and deeply connect with embodied needs in my own work. Our conversations were incredibly inspiring—perhaps also elevated by the shared meditation beforehand, which seemed to open a different, more grounded level of exchange. I contributed thoughts and reflections (see photo) that I might not have connected in this way under different circumstances.
A huge thank-you to the team for their vision in designing the session like this. I believe for many of us it offered a rare moment to pause during an intense week, and to step into the rest of the conference both inspired and more consciously aware.
