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Belonging and Its Conditions in Urban Life: A Generative–Relational Discussion

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This discussion paper investigates how belonging may emerge as a durable yet revisable orientation toward people, places, practices, and institutions, and what architectural and urban design can contribute under possible post-labor conditions. It distinguishes experienced attachment, enacted participation, functional affiliation, institutional recognition, and authority over relational conditions. A generative–relational approach proposes that antecedent histories, heterogeneous interaction, feedback, and reflective normative revision may produce relatively stable orientations; dynamical stabilization and symmetry breaking remain conditional explanatory representations. Human–AI comparison examines persistent artificial affiliation while retaining uncertainty about subjective artificial experience and moral standing. Changes to employment, everyday rhythms, and AI-mediated companionship motivate alternative urban scenarios rather than a single forecast. The spatial inquiry links buildings, streets, shared facilities, urban organization, and institutional stewardship to feasible opportunities for voluntary encounters and continuing practices. It treats autonomy, exclusion, and competing normative commitments as constitutive questions of design and governance. Network analysis, agent-based modeling, longitudinal inquiry, and hypothetical comparative experiments at urban-block, civic-building, and street-network scales provide an investigable research programme. The paper develops an explanatory and evaluative interface between subject formation and the conditions that enable or constrain relational life, while distinguishing observable activity, lived belonging, and judgments of institutional legitimacy.
DOI: 10.17613/t15d9-7dd76
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225590152
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