The residency
A cohort that spans generations, one question, and ground that answers back.
Ten years, one chapter a year, each on ground that is already busy being itself. This page holds the whole of it: the idea, the practice, and the places.
The idea
One question, held open across places and years. The cohort, the ground and the week are all built to keep asking it well.
The framing
In tension
to intention.
Every place is held between what it already is and what it imagines for itself.
In tension: the inherited constraints, the land, the water, the capital, the habits a place already lives with.
Intention: the future it is trying to write, and the frameworks it uses to say whether it is getting there.
Creators work in that gap as civic actors, shaping a place while it is still deciding what it will be.
The architecture beneath it
A productive friction. The cohort is built around it.
Habitats
Real, custodial, lived places.
Held by founders, foundations, long-lineage stewards, artistic organisations embedded in a town, and, in the host case, by the public-sector apparatus itself. Each one is already in tension: land, water, capital, attention, time.
Urbanisms
Theories of the future city.
Wellbeing measurement, cultural regeneration, smart-city orthodoxy, longevity infrastructure, the state imaginary. The intention layer: frameworks for what a place could be, and ways to read whether it is becoming that.
The Creators sit across the gap, practitioners holding lived places and lenses carrying theories of the city, so the two read each other in real time.
The design principle
The residency is left deliberately open. It began in 2026 and renews each year on different ground, and what it finds in one chapter sets the ground for the next. Flow, uncertainty and emergence are the design.
The week holds enough order to keep a cohort together, and enough room for something unplanned to happen. That edge is where the work gets interesting.
The practice
Five movements carry a chapter from the tension a custodian is already holding, through the week, to the thing left behind on the ground it visited.
01
The same question lands on new ground each chapter, chosen for a live tension a real custodian is already carrying. The ground is scoped during the previous chapter, so every year begins mid-sentence.
02
A small group of Creators is assembled around that question: people holding lived places, and people carrying theories of the future city. Deliberately mismatched, deliberately small.
03
Most of the week stays unpublished. Salons, studio visits, long meals, a co-design session. High trust and no audience, the conditions under which practitioners say what they actually think.
04
The week opens out once. A single public moment where the cohort steps onto a stage together and the city is invited into the argument.
05
Every chapter leaves something made on the ground it visited: a commission, a framework, a district design. The object is the visible part, and the relationships around it are what compound.
Authorship
The question, the cohort, the curation, the production and the delivery are held by the same hands. That is how an open format stays coherent across years and continents, and how each chapter inherits what the last one learned.
The places
Living ground where urbanisms meet real conditions over real time. Every sandbox is read the same way: what holds it in tension, what it intends, and what it offers the practice that no other ground can. A place reads as layers, so one ground holds many facets at once.
Rajasthan
Citymaking as cultivation
Madhya Pradesh
Citymaking as long-horizon stewardship
Sicily
Citymaking as cultural regeneration
United Kingdom
Citymaking as public-realm reanimation
Queensland
Citymaking as lived experience
United Kingdom
Citymaking at town scale: ecology, food, local economy
Uttar Pradesh
Citymaking as material practice
Host ground
Citymaking as state imagination
What each chapter leaves
Something made, and an answer the host place keeps working with after the cohort leaves.
The Citymaking Circle sustains the residency, and the residency is where its members meet real ground and real practice.
What a chapter finds is published as it is found, open to anyone.
Next chapter
Ten years, one chapter a year. Singapore holds the even years and the residency travels in the odd ones. Each chapter is published as it becomes real.
What is the role of the creator in the life of a city? The answer gets worked out each year, on ground that is already busy being itself.
By invitation
Come and work on real ground with us.
The residency is convened and sustained by The Citymaking Circle. Places are held for members and invited Creators.