Live, Work, Play, Belong

Building the Complete City

Imagine you lived in a city that loved you as much as Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire loved Renée Zellweger’s Dorothy Boyd—or as much as Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Rod Tidwell loved himself. So much so that your city not only expressed its love for you, but gushed, “You complete me.”

Instead, in recent decades, many cities have said to residents: “Show me the money!”

They’ve done it in a lot of ways, particularly through exclusionary zoning and other policies that have made the cost of living high—or at least made the quality of urban living not worth the luxury price. One consequence is that entire segments of the population have disappeared from our cities.

Urbanists often talk about the “missing middle”—ostensibly a reference to housing types like family-friendly apartments, but it’s really about something deeper: the people who are no longer there. There’s a whole bunch of people missing from our cities: families, middle-income earners like firefighters and teachers, older folks who couldn’t afford to retire in place, lower-income people who didn’t qualify for public support. The result is that many cities have become places only for the young, the rich, and the subsidized.

We’ve hollowed out whole classes of people and left our cities, well, incomplete.

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson has recently called for making Austin a “complete city,” centered on affordability—not just of housing, but of childcare, transportation, and the essentials of daily life. As the mayor describes it, a complete city is:

A city of opportunity and pathways to building a career, buying a home, taking care of family. It’s got to be a place where everyone can share in the wealth of our city and build a future in our community.

The implication, of course, is that Austin is incomplete, that opportunities have not been broadly shared. Housing is too expensive, the good jobs are available to transplants more than newcomers, upward mobility has stalled. Affordability and economic opportunity are critical foundations of a complete city, but I think the mayor’s identification of the city as a place where you can build a future gets to something deeper. Affordability and opportunity aren’t enough to live a complete urban life. A complete city has to offer something more.

To build a future in a city, you have to believe that you belong there.

During the pandemic, as fears of the “urban doom loop” loomed large, many cities revived the idea of “live-work-play” communities to lure residents, workers, and visitors back to downtowns. In many ways, the strategy worked: the outflow of residents slowed or reversed, workers and visitors returned, and crime rates dropped. But this recovery has been fragile: many cities still face revenue shortfalls and budget deficits that threaten recent gains—and many people remain hesitant to return.

Live-work-play communities weren’t a bad idea—nor were they new when the pandemic made them seem more urgent. The idea that a flourishing downtown could not be about one thing—either an office- or entertainment-only district—reflected the fact that a full human life is multifaceted and complex. Live-work-play captures the essential, varied rhythms of daily life: shelter, employment, recreation, and social interaction. That’s more than real estate marketing mumbo-jumbo.

But it’s incomplete.

Framing people primarily as residents, workers, and consumers is limiting—not only in terms of what a city exists to do but in how we imagine urban life. Live-work-play omits essential aspects of the full human experience. Certainly, the words, and their interactions with each other, imply more than a very narrow list of human activity: education is implied by “work” and “play”; “live” implies the conveniences and necessities of home life, not only the physical structure in which one lives. But you can only imply so much. What does the live-work-play framing say about our inner lives? Or our communal lives? In my view, at least two other spheres of life are left out. What’s missing are the realms of God and Caesar, Church and State.

A truly complete city nourishes more than the material—it also nourishes our spiritual and civic lives. The spiritual and the civic are about how we connect—with ourselves, our places, and each other. They’re about how we restore and how we engage.

“Restore” refers to spaces and opportunities for reflection, healing, and renewal. It’s about the psychic restoration and spiritual renewal needed outside of the stresses and patterns of our home and work lives, beyond the pleasures offered by mere entertainment and escapism. Restoration can be secular or religious—through meditation or prayer, reflection or worship, through the experience (not only consumption) of art and music. Some of these spaces are private: churches and spas, theaters and auditoriums. Others are public: parks and gardens, libraries and monuments. Many are multipurpose. Restoration can happen alone or with others, in solitude or among strangers and friends.

“Engage” is about inviting citizens into public life, fostering trust, solidarity, and collective action. The civic sphere is where we engage with our fellow citizens and participate in a broader civic life. We can engage in lots of ways: through political advocacy at city hall, rallying on the street, joining a neighborhood association, voting at a polling place, hosting salons, even simply talking about issues with friends and neighbors. Engagement builds trust, solidarity, and a shared sense of purpose—the foundations of community and democracy. For the most part, it takes place in shared public spaces.

Restoration and engagement are crucial aspects of urban life. Without places to restore, people feel rootless. Without ways to engage, people feel powerless. Without either, people feel disconnected, disengaged, and burnt out. With both, they feel a sense of belonging.

In other words, a complete city is not one in which people merely live, work, and play. A complete city is one in which people feel like they belong.

Cities can help foster a sense of belonging through how they design the public realm: parks and plazas where people can gather; pedestrian-oriented, shade-covered streets; public buildings that are integrated into neighborhoods rather than sealed off and detached from public life. But placemaking is not enough—the place has to be well-managed, too. City governance should be transparent, orderly, and accessible—not opaque, byzantine, and bureaucratic. They should be service-oriented and welcoming, not obsessed with paperwork and procedures.

They should be the kind of places that, as New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie puts it, “let you come and be anything you want—without us getting in your way.”

If cities offer only opportunities to live, work, and play, they will by omission exclude whole spheres of human life that give people a sense of belonging, leaving themselves as fragile and hollow places. Flourishing cities are ones in which people can live flourishing lives. Cities must remove barriers to abundant housing. They must embrace evolving economic realities about the nature of work. They must be places where people can have fun. But above all, they must foster connection—both individually and collectively.

A complete city isn’t just a place to survive, produce, or consume. It’s not just a place you can afford—it’s a place where you want to build a future. A place that touches something deeper in the soul—one that speaks to you and says, “You complete me.”

This is an idea I’m still thinking about, and will surely write more about in the future, but I’m curious: what does belonging mean to you? How do you think of a “complete city”?