Supported Cities is a research collective exploring belonging in London. Working across visualisation and public dialogue, the group approaches belonging as something to be made visible and discussed.

At its heart is a conviction: that the culture spaces, community gardens, running clubs, and shared tables keeping belonging alive in London are not accidents. They are the product of invisible labour, the sustained, underfunded work of community organisers who hold social infrastructure together with very little institutional support. Supported Cities makes that labour visible.

Methodology : The collective was developed by four practitioners: Ankita Dhal, Ana Flavia Fernandes, Arabella Kemp, and Lucas Ng — each bringing a distinct somatic methodology for mapping belonging through people rather than through data.

Arabella developed a running-to-belong futures methodology, using movement through the city as a way of speculating about who the city is for and who it leaves behind. Lucas developed scenic routes, a walks-as-empathy practice using wandering and observation as tools for understanding neighbourhood belonging from the ground up. Flavia and Ankita (Threads Lab) worked with storytelling through collage and reflective journalling, using material-making and personal narrative as ways of externalising and sharing embodied knowledge of place.

Together these four methodologies formed a way of reading the city that no map or planning document can replicate - intimate, speculative, and rooted in the people who actually live there.

London Festival of Architecture 2026

Supported Cities ran as a five-event public programme across London, hosted at the Royal Geographical Society, Mile End Climbing Wall at Victoria Park, and Reference Point. Panel partners included Five Points, Poetic Unity, Digital Futures, Bold Tendencies, ESEA Community Centre, and Katakata Brixton — organisations doing the daily work of sustaining community life in the city. Two events in collaboration with NOMAD were recognised as NLA Curator's Picks. An augmented reality installation of participant stories, Common Grounds, was exhibited at the NLA at Guildhall.

Common Grounds x NOMAD

Common Grounds was a four-part weekly workshop series developed in collaboration with NOMAD, using participatory mapping, doodling, and visual ethnography to collect stories of belonging from citizens across London. Each session invited participants to externalise their experience of the city through drawing and mark-making rather than words, treating the hand as a research instrument and the page as a shared map. The stories gathered across these sessions became the foundation for the augmented reality installation exhibited at the NLA at Guildhall, making visible a collective portrait of belonging that exists nowhere in official records of the city.

Supported Cities demonstrated that participatory planning is not just a slower or softer version of conventional urban design. It is a more honest one, because it starts with the people who already know the city best.