Ideas

An Experience Can Become a Community

2026

A festival gathers people for a day. What holds them together for the two years in between is the thing worth designing.

The Art of Citymaking opened at the Glass Dome in Singapore on 17 June 2026, during World Cities Summit week, across three themes: Adaptive Neighbourhoods, Urban Software, and Placemaking and Legacy. Talks, panels, film and immersive work, held to a date and a standard, in front of an audience.

A single day is a fair test of a practice. It cannot be delayed or phased, and the room either holds or it does not. The festival is the occasion. The Circle is the practice.

The Citymaking Circle carries the work between festivals as a community for people who shape cities, now one hundred and fifty members meeting across ASEAN, the Asia Pacific and beyond. Field Notes publishes alongside it, written by the people building better cities.

The most useful question to ask of any experience is what is left of it eighteen months later. The festival returns to Singapore in June 2028. The membership never left.