I was recently a guest on the Ideal Spaces podcast, talking about the state of communities in today’s cities.
My main point was one I keep coming back to: buildings alone don’t make a community. Architecture is the hardware, but it also needs the software of social organization and the orgware that brings people together to make change. That’s what separates a real community from a mere audience, people simply fed with information. We dug into what it actually takes to build the former instead of the latter.
About Ideal Spaces: It’s a charitable foundation established under German law in 2019, based in Baden-Württemberg, that promotes research in science, arts, and culture. Its focus is unusually thoughtful, studying spatial concepts, utopian ideas, and “ideal spaces,” while also helping create room for alternative urban planning. The perfect place to ask not just how we build cities, but why we imagine them the way we do.
You can listen to the full interview here
Mustafa Sherif 