Places

Eight sandboxes, eight authorships of the future city.

Living ground where urbanisms are tested in real conditions, over real time.

Places are fixed; people move through them. Each sandbox is read the same way: what it is held in tension by, what it intends, and what it offers the practice that no other ground can.

A street in Tiong Bahru, Singapore — Ground read in the first chapter, Singapore 2026

A place is read as layers rather than zones, so one ground can hold many facets at once.

Dhun

Rajasthan

Citymaking as cultivation

In tension: Barren land, scarce water, the slow arithmetic of growing a neighbourhood from zero.
Intention: A human-scale habitat for ~8,500, grown tree by tree, well by well, held against a long horizon.
What it offers: Ground where net-wellbeing measurement can be read from inception, before the place hardens.

Kathiwada

Madhya Pradesh

Citymaking as long-horizon stewardship

In tension: 149 villages across 700 sq km of Vindhya hills; rural fabric outside the metropolitan gaze.
Intention: A house six centuries old quietly authoring a thirty-year strategy, education, health, heritage, sport.
What it offers: A test of whether urban frameworks travel beyond the dense metropolis at all.

Favara

Sicily

Citymaking as cultural regeneration

In tension: An abandoned southern town and the gravity that pulls people and capital elsewhere.
Intention: A town reanimated through art, architecture and community, culture as civic infrastructure.
What it offers: A reading of what cultural intensity does to a place's measurable felt experience.

Coastal Kent

United Kingdom

Citymaking as public-realm reanimation

In tension: A coastal town carrying decades of disinvestment, with its public realm waiting to be claimed.
Intention: A durational artistic residency in place, the public realm as stage, ordinary people as protagonists.
What it offers: A reading of how sustained artistic practice reshapes a town's felt life and civic confidence.

Brisbane

Queensland

Citymaking as lived experience

In tension: A river city rebuilding itself against an Olympic deadline, infrastructure, heat and growth arriving faster than the civic life meant to hold them.
Intention: A subtropical city asking what kind of everyday life its next decade of building should make possible.
What it offers: A reading of a city rewriting itself in public, where the felt outcome is still open.

Stroud

United Kingdom

Citymaking at town scale: ecology, food, local economy

In tension: A small market town with a deep independent, ecological and maker culture, pressed by commuter-belt economics and the cost of staying.
Intention: A local economy held as an ecology, food, land, craft and enterprise treated as one system rather than separate sectors.
What it offers: A test of whether urbanisms written for the metropolis hold at town scale, where everyone is within reach of everyone.

Moradabad

Uttar Pradesh

Citymaking as material practice

In tension: A craft city whose artisan economy sits outside the smart-city imaginary, undervalued upstream, invisible to most urban frameworks.
Intention: Craft bridged with global design, incubating the substrates of the next industrial era from waste and discovery.
What it offers: Citymaking read from its materials and makers, what the city is built of, and who builds it.

Singapore

Host ground

Citymaking as state imagination

In tension: A city-state whose density, scarcity and pace push every future into a single tight frame.
Intention: A long-range tapestry authored by public officers, technology, nature, family, food, security, held together.
What it offers: A counterpoint: the felt city read against a state-led model of the future.

Where a chapter lands, and when, is set by the circuit. See the editions.