We made a podcast with Liga Andersone, a Latvian producer, founder and CEO of Light Lab Ltd./Riga. Light Lab is a motion capture and animation studio specializing in visual storytelling, performance capture and digital production for film, games and TV. We spoke about how to bring interest in communal affairs back to the younger generation via animated work; about identity questions of the younger generation; Self-understandings today, related to the global political instability today; and social media and their impacts. Regarding these topics, we addressed questions of democracy and its future.

In our podcast with Ethan Kent, we spoke about community building and placemaking in the framework of the overall socioeconomic situation today. Ethan is executive director of the U.S. organization PlacemakingX, active in building up a global placemaking movement. We spoke about the central role of places for community building, since places can be seen as a nucleus for transformative approaches. This includes not only architectural design, but environmental and infrastructural aspects, and also aspects of governance, social equity, and urban planning. PlacemakingX establishes international conferences on placemaking, with a focus on public space/place and urban development, helping to achieve inclusive public spaces. According to Ethan, the overall aim is to amplify and accelerate overall placemaking learning in different countries.

In a podcast with Ron Cox, we spoke about the possibilities of building up concrete communities, and how to keep them resilient and stable. Ron Cox has over 40 years of professional experience as a leader, facilitator, consultant, and coach. Amongst other activities, he has been the CEO of a large U.S. company (the Kincaid Group) leading a transformational turnaround, and led large projects in both public and private sector development. He became a Hall of Fame Coach in 2018 and Amazon best selling author in 2023. Our discussion with Ron focused on aspects of resilience in relation to community, and on the mindset as a basic premise for community. An essential aspect regarding the mindset is to get the younger generation out of its screen-time culture and social media-induced isolationism, and to engage in real communities instead. Also, aspects of a more humane city had been addressed.

In a look together with Martin Savransky, new informal or “unruly” ways of liveability are addressed. Martin Safransky is a philosopher and social theorist currently serving as Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology (CSIC), the biggest public research institution in Spain, where he leads the Liveable Futures Project. He is author and co-author of several works devoted to such futures, and investigates what he calls “unruly”, informal politics of liveability amidst permanent planetary instability. These informal new ways to social change and liveable futures, and our podcast with Martin addresses them in comparison to traditional approaches in utopian concepts and ways of change.

In a podcast with Natasha Sharma from Mumbai/India and Dee Moxon from Bristol/ UK, the role of art as a catalysator for building communities was addressed. Natasha Sharma is co-founder, creative director and curator of the Govandi Arts Festival in Mumbai. Dee Moxon is one of the directors of the Lamplighter Arts CIC in Bristol, making The Church Road Lantern Parade.

Both Govandi and the Lantern Parade started under adverse conditions. The Govandi area in Mumbai is inhabited by the city’s largest resettlement population, has sanitary issues, lack of infrastructure, garbage, and crime. The Church Road Lantern Parade in Bristol began working across its local community which experiences socioeconomic problems. They work with all residents, including refugees from different cultures, the event was started after racist activity in the area by non -residents. Marginalization was the common daily experience in both Mumbai and Bristol.

Both the Govandi Festival and the Lantern Parade, assisted by Jonathan Kennedy from the British Council, follow the philosophy that making art together, in a group, helps to connect people and through that, a sense of community is given purposefulness, and meaning. Installed in two different cultural contexts, Indian and English, and despite adverse conditions, the philosophy was highly successful: In its power of imagination, art is a strong catalyst in building communities, it helps to generate a space of belonging and identity.

Ideal Spaces had an interview with Jonathan Kennedy, former member of the British Council, on the role of art in building communities. Two communities were examined, located in two different regions and cultures, India and England. Critical success factors for building up and sustaining communities were examined, and how to build them from scratch under unfavourable starting conditions.

The interview revisits a timeless question that has taken on renewed urgency: the idea of the ideal city. Far from being obsolete, the concept remains a vital source of inspiration—especially in the context of building a more sustainable and humane urban future.

Drawing on historical models of planned cities, the conversation situates these ideas within a contemporary Canadian context. Two projects developed by Josephson and his team are presented as case studies: Innisfil and The Hearn.

Innisfil can be understood as an “ideal city on the ground”—a masterplanned urban model that combines two classical frameworks: the utopian concentric circle (garden city plan) and the Roman grid. The project engages core questions of infrastructural integration, urban life, including building typologies, scale, density, and neighbourhood structure.

In contrast, The Hearn—a former power plant once among the largest in North America—represents a different approach. Rather than expanding outward, it proposes a radical form of adaptive reuse: transforming a single building into a self-contained urban environment. In this sense, it becomes a vessel for cohabitation—a city within a structure. The project can be read in dialogue with the unrealized ambitions of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace—not as a direct lineage, but as a shared intellectual territory in which architecture operates as an open-ended framework for occupation, transformation, and collective life. Like the Fun Palace, The Hearn suggests a shift away from static form toward architecture as an enabling system—capable of hosting evolving programs, social dynamics, and forms of participation over time.

Together, these two projects frame alternative ways of rethinking the ideal city today: one as a ground-up urban system, the other as an internalized, architectural one.

In our series about the younger generation, we had an interview with the young Ukrainian artist and music producer Syfromfaraway who also makes his own albums. We asked Sy about his view on society and its important trends according to his view, on the younger generation and their relations to social media, and how he conceives the recent situation in its total. We also asked him about his fears in regards to the future, and how to cope with fear in a positive, not fearful way.

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