The Urban Belonging Project

To design a more socially sustainable city, we long for more diverse and nuanced insights about how the city works as a space of belonging - not seen from the professional eyes of those who plan it, but from those who live in it. To explore this, the Urban Belonging project was initiated in 2021 by a collective of planners and scholars in Copenhagen with the ambition of mapping lived experiences of under-represented communities in the city.

We need to rethink the way we engage local knowledge and experiences from citizen in the planning and policy making related to cities. Using participatory methods such as map-making and photovoice, it is possible to engage and foreground diverse communities and lived experiences as data points that can inform design of cities that work for all people. The project reveals insigths about when, where, and why seven different marginalized communities experiences feeling at home in the city, maps geospatial patterns in how different groups use the city, and explores what 'belonging' means to different people.