Troops on U.S. streets. Blue cities painted as enemies of the state. Deportation raids targeting sanctuary cities. Programs lifting vulnerable communities out of poverty attacked. DEI programs under attack. Public trust in government at historic lows. And the drumbeat of war growing louder. Against this backdrop, Next City is publishing a series of essays on democracy in American cities – the forces eroding it, and how we can restore it from the ground up. Read more in our series: Reclamation Starts Now.

The heart of great cities and great democracies is the quality of public life. While cities have transformed in both form and function since antiquity, one truth remains: democracy requires participation. As city residents withdraw from shared spaces and civic life, the invisible threads connecting communities splinter.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic, stating that “the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” After a hundred years of shaping urban development that structurally imposes solitude, we may have reached a point where its benefits are waning, and we are now grappling with the isolating effects of how our cities are designed.

Our increasing solitude is not self-imposed. It has been master planned and systematically implemented. The fact is that structurally, we have built cities that have often made it easier to disconnect from each other. Since Robert Putnam famously identified the fracturing of American communities since the ‘70s in “Bowling Alone,” social isolation has only increased. The past decade alone has seen a 10% increase in the time Americans spend at home.

Rapid global development of car-centric neighborhoods, historically segregated suburban communities and decentralized cities is creating an unprecedented fragmentation of the urban fabric of cities, as well as the social fabric it informs. The modern built environment has prioritized pockets of privacy, rather than centering civic spaces that spur neighborly connections and serendipitous conversations.

The creation of private alternatives of public goods, presented as improvements — pools, playgrounds, home theaters — results in a social inclination to live more privately, forming a vicious cycle where increased isolation and time spent in private places decrease public life and utilization of public spaces. The inefficiency, isolation and exclusion involved in more private lifestyles are not only harmful to the residents who buy into them but also to the civic health of their cities.

We see the effects of structural solitude on civic health today, as communities contend with the unraveling social fabric of cities and countries contend with democratic backsliding. German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who survived World War II and produced seminal works on totalitarianism, once wrote that totalitarianism “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Though decades of designing cities for structural solitude may be partially responsible for more lonely individuals and more fractured communities, Arendt’s warnings also point to the source of the solution. Creating spaces that ensure the experience of belonging weakens the appeal of totalitarianism by connecting individuals (rather than isolating them) and strengthening communities (rather than dividing them).

Belonging presents a communal cure to combat loneliness by enabling individuals to feel emotionally connected, welcomed, and included. Drawing on Arendt, city leaders and urban planners can play a critical role in restoring democracy by reimagining built environments that have produced solitude and loneliness to ones that inclusively cultivate connectedness and belonging across all races, ages and ethnicities.

With a goal of combating loneliness by fostering belonging, as Arendt suggests, cities are working to restore the shared spaces that support democracy. Reimagining third places for everyone is an effective way to start. Whether it’s restaurants and coffee shops, public parks and plazas, or community centers and libraries, communities need more places to connect. All third places have the chance to strengthen the social fabric of cities, and all cities have the responsibility to reinforce the foundational shared spaces that make great cities of democracy.

Third spaces can be included in mixed-use projects, whether it be coffee shops and restaurants, green space or space for communities. One such example is The Crosstown Concourse in Memphis, Tennessee, which shows how to create third places through a bottom-up approach to inclusive programming, designing high-quality public spaces, and reimagining a civic identity that ensures the building feels like it belongs to the community.

While anchored by residential, commercial and institutional uses, the building’s true value lies in its over six floors of unique indoor and outdoor public spaces, creating a vibrant ecosystem that invites the public to gather, engage and collaborate. As cities revitalize neighborhoods, tackle vacant structures, or engage in master planning, Crosstown Concourse serves as a model for how to inclusively center belonging in the process.

‘Belonging’ has surfaced as a foundational theme across a diverse number of professions as a deeper objective of happiness and connectedness. Gallup’s annual Happiness Report measures various dimensions of life satisfaction, but cites social connection and a sense of belonging as key indicators to assess the happiness of entire nations. A recent article by architecture firm Gensler suggests the positive business impact of belonging in the workplace as more than a feel-good concept.

Understanding the value of belonging, civic health, and democracy in the United States, the American Immigration Council recently proposed a nuanced new tool in the “Belonging Barometer,” which introduces a scale from exclusion to belonging to quantify a sense of belonging across five life settings: family, friends, workplace, local community and the nation.

Notably, the highest rate of non-belonging (74%) was observed within the local community, underscoring the unique role of cities to help residents feel like they belong.

Democracy is an inherently social government, designed and operated by its people. It is threatened by social fragmentation, civic disengagement and hyper-individualistic decision-making. But we also know democracy is strengthened by social cohesion, civic engagement and collective decision-making, giving cities a roadmap for stitching their communities back together.