June 2026
We no longer have a date to experience anything together. Unless it's sports. That's not a small loss. It's the whole argument.
Anuradha Sachdev built and led a fifty-person practice putting agentic AI into production at enterprise scale. This is what that work revealed.
Waste Time Magnificently
Growing up in India before satellite television, there were a handful of shows that everybody watched. Not because they were the best things available. Because they were the only things available. Wednesday night was Chitrahaar — film songs, back to back, for an hour, on Doordarshan, the one channel. Sunday was a Hindi film — one film, the same film, watched by everyone with a television at the same hour. Sunday morning had Rangoli. You couldn't time-shift any of it. You couldn't opt out and find something better. On Monday morning you could talk to anyone about the Sunday film because there was no other Sunday film. The shared schedule was the shared experience. The constraint was the commons.
The scarcity created the occasion. The occasion created the community.
My parents lived in a mining town, far from any city, the kind of place that had one of everything. One club. One given day when everyone went. I can't remember which day it was. The point is there was a day, and everyone knew it, and so everyone went. Not because they had chosen those particular people from a curated list of compatible neighbors. Because the day existed and the club was what existed and showing up was simply what you did.
Nobody designed the community. It was a byproduct of having nowhere else to be.
That condition sounds like deprivation from the outside. From the inside it produced something we spend enormous effort trying to recreate now: a commons. A group of people with a shared reference, a shared rhythm, a shared sense of what happened this week and who was there. Not because they were compatible. Because they were present.
| We no longer have a date to experience anything together. Unless it's sports. That's not a small loss. It's the whole argument.
Sports is the last mass occasion. The last thing that happens at a specific time, that you cannot time-shift without losing the point, that everyone watches simultaneously and talks about the next morning. That's not an accident. That's why sports has become so culturally dominant even as everything else has fragmented. It's not only that people love sports. It's that sports is one of the last things that creates a genuine Wednesday. A moment that is collective because it is live and shared and unrepeatable.
Infinite choice arrived and the Wednesday disappeared inside it. When everything is available always, nothing creates an occasion. When the experience is optimized for you alone, there's nothing to compare with anyone else. The commons didn't get destroyed. It got personalized out of existence.
The city doesn't change when a guest arrives. You do.
I have a version of myself that only appears when I travel. Curious. Open. Willing to walk into a place I've never heard of, take a detour, spend an hour somewhere I didn't plan to be. That person is fully alive in cities I'm passing through. In the city where I live, she requires a reason to come out.
When someone visits, I go places I've been meaning to go for two years. I finally eat at the restaurant everyone talks about. I walk streets I would normally drive. For three days I hold two things at once — the knowledge of a resident and the attention of a visitor. Then the guest leaves and I stop.
What the guest gives me is not information. It's permission. Permission to be a person who is looking. Who has no agenda except to be somewhere. That permission doesn't require a plane ticket. It requires a decision. And something about ordinary life makes that decision almost impossible to sustain on your own.
Alain de Botton argues in The Architecture of Happiness that buildings speak to us about who we could be. A well-designed space doesn't just shelter you — it makes a claim on you. It calls out a version of yourself you might not have access to on your own. The great civic room — the library, the market, the piazza — makes you feel like a person among persons. Not a consumer. A citizen. The question worth sitting with: what spaces in the city you live in are calling out that version of you? And if the answer is not many — whose problem is that?
Everyone has their version of what gets them out. For me it's the Huntington — not because I decided to go but because something specific is happening there that won't be there next month. The desert garden in bloom. A particular light in March. The sense that if I don't go now I'll miss it. That seasonality does what Chitrahaar did. It creates an occasion out of open time. It removes the decision. For someone else it's the neighborhood walk with a friend on a fixed morning, or the ritual of the same coffee place on Saturdays. The versions are different. The structure underneath is the same: a recurring thing that was already there, waiting, that made showing up easier than not.
The dog decided. You just put on the shoes.
People with children engage more with their neighborhoods. People with dogs engage more. Not because they are more curious or more open. Because their lives have contact built in. The school pickup line. The dog park at seven AM. The other parents at the Saturday game. They didn't choose those interactions the way you choose to go to a restaurant. The interactions were non-optional. They happened whether or not the person was in the mood, whether or not the timing was convenient, whether or not they would have chosen that particular person on that particular day.
And out of that non-optional contact, something grows. Familiarity. Then recognition. Then, sometimes, actual connection. Not because the people were exceptional. Because the structure was reliable.
The person with no children and no dog has to generate all of that from scratch. Every time. That is an enormous amount of activation energy for something that is supposed to feel natural. Most days, the couch wins. Not because the person is less social. Because the couch requires nothing and the neighborhood requires everything.
Every attempt to design around this has been too light or too heavy. The app that reminds you to call a friend is too light — it still requires a decision, and on the day you most need contact you are least able to make one. The structured program with the agenda and the facilitator is too heavy — the obligation is there but the spontaneity isn't, and without spontaneity the contact stays thin.
| What actually works is in between. Not invited. Expected. The recurring thing that doesn't require RSVP because you're assumed to be there unless you say otherwise.
Expected presence is different from required presence. It's closer to what the dog provides. You didn't commit to the dog park this morning. But the dog has expectations, and meeting them feels like a choice even though it isn't really, and at the dog park you run into the same people and over six months you know their names and their dogs' names and something about their lives. None of that was designed. All of it depended on a structure that made showing up the path of least resistance.
The program is the infrastructure
In 1961, Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price proposed a building on the Thames with no fixed program. Moveable walls. Adjustable floors. A cybernetic system — Gordon Pask was involved — that would respond to what people actually did with it in real time. They called it the Fun Palace. Littlewood called it a university of the streets. It was never built.
The technology Price imagined was the wrong answer to the right question. He thought the responsiveness had to live in the building. Cranes. Reconfigurable structure. A machine that learned from its inhabitants. What he was actually looking for was simpler and more durable than any of that.
The Tuesday music practice that is just always there. The Thursday tombola that belongs to this neighborhood and not any other. The Saturday seed swap. The monthly mend-and-repair table where people bring broken things. None of these require a building designed for them. They require a room, a time, and enough consistency that the neighborhood starts to expect them. The program is the infrastructure. Not the building.
| Price imagined a building smart enough to respond to what a neighborhood needed. What actually creates that responsiveness is simpler: something happening on a Thursday that the neighborhood chose for itself.
The recurring program solves three things at once. It solves activation energy — you don't decide to go to Tuesday music night, you just decide whether this is the Tuesday you show up, which is a much smaller ask. It solves sustainability — two enthusiastic neighbors don't have to carry it, because the program is the load-bearing structure, not the people. The people rotate. The thing persists. And it solves the identity problem — a space calls out a version of yourself more effectively when it has been making that call for months. You're not walking into a room. You're walking into an ongoing thing that already knows how to hold people.
Each neighborhood finds its thing. The tombola in one place, the music practice in another, the film night somewhere else. Not a city initiative with a curriculum and a budget line that disappears in the next fiscal year. Something that emerged from who is actually there, and what they actually wanted to do on a Thursday night. Something that becomes, over time, what this neighborhood does.
You don't join. You don't register. You don't commit. You show up because there's a tombola on Thursdays and the room is two blocks away and the door is open.
The civic investment already happened
Almost every neighborhood in every city of any size has a school gymnasium locked by 6 p.m. A public library with meeting rooms that see two bookings a week. A church hall dark six days out of seven. A parking structure ground floor empty on weekends. A community college campus that clears out at five.
The physical footprint exists. The civic investment already happened. What's missing is not space. It's activation and permission.
The most alive neighborhood spaces I've seen were almost never purpose-built. A school gym on Friday nights that a community group negotiated access to. A parking ground floor that the city leased to a market on Saturdays. A fire station courtyard that opened for a summer. The life came from the negotiated use. The activation was the architecture.
What prevents this from scaling is coordination cost. Who has the keys. Who is responsible when something breaks. How three community groups share a gymnasium across a week without stepping on each other. That is a solvable problem. It is not a glamorous one. But it is the actual constraint — not vision, not money, not space. Coordination.
This is where the technology belongs. Not the personalization layer. The logistics layer. Scheduling. Access. Accountability. The system that makes a school gymnasium available to its neighborhood seven nights a week without a full-time administrator at every location. AI aimed at the coordination problem is AI aimed at something real. Right now it is aimed at predicting which product you'll click on next.
| The capability is being pointed at preference. It could be pointed at access.
The city that figures this out doesn't need a new monument. It needs a decision: that the gymnasium two blocks from where you live should be open and warm and asking nothing of you on a Thursday night. That this is what cities are for.
Evidence that you belong somewhere
A friend invited me to the farmers market in her neighborhood in La Cañada. We were just walking around, no particular plan. In the space of an hour she ran into three neighbors. Three separate conversations, each one unscheduled, each one the kind of exchange that takes thirty seconds and stays with you. I enjoy a farmers market. But a farmers market where you bump into your neighbors is a different thing entirely. It's not a better market. It's evidence that someone belongs somewhere. That the place knows her and she knows the place and the market was simply the occasion where that knowing could surface.
I've been thinking about belonging for a long time. When I first came to America for school, I lived in LA for years. Eventually I thought: I've only ever lived here. I wanted to try another city. A walkable city. So I moved to San Francisco.
It was hard. Genuinely, persistently hard. SF is exactly the city that should have worked — dense, walkable, full of culture, full of people. I kept at it for three years. But as a single person, a grown adult in her forties, without the built-in structures — no dog, no child, no institution that required my physical presence in the same place with the same people — I could not find my way in. The city was alive around me and I was outside it.
My mother, who is wise, suggested I come back and look at my old place in LA. I did. I moved back. I did it just before COVID, which I am more grateful for than I can fully say. My friends here are family. The kind of friends that took years to build and that I would not have been able to build in SF, not in the way I would have needed to, not starting over in my forties without an occasion to make the encounters non-optional.
They say it takes a year to feel at home somewhere. After three years in SF I never quite got there. But after I moved back to LA, I flew to SF for work. At the airport, on the way in, someone looked vaguely familiar. She came over to say hello. We had gone to the same farmers market, she reminded me. That was the whole relationship. The same Saturday morning, the same stalls, the same low-threshold recurring occasion. We had never been friends. She didn't have my number. But she knew my face, and she was warm, and that warmth — from someone I had never really known — was what three years of a San Francisco farmers market had produce
| Being in the same place at the same hour, week after week, was enough to make a stranger cross a room for me.
Time that justifies itself
Price called the Fun Palace a place where you could waste time magnificently. Not leisure, which implies recovery. Not entertainment, which implies consumption. Magnificent waste. Time that justifies itself by the quality of being alive in it.
The mining town club. Chitrahaar on Wednesday nights. The La Cañada farmers market. The SF Saturday morning that left one warm face in an airport. None of them were designed for belonging. All of them produced it, as a byproduct of simply being there, reliably, at the same time, with whoever else showed up.
The Wednesday was given to us. The Thursday is the one we make.
The Fun Palace failed to get built because nobody could figure out who it was for. The answer was always: whoever walks through the door. The door just has to be open. On a Thursday. Every Thursday. Until the neighborhood starts to expect it and the expectation becomes the thing itself.
We have the technology. We have the buildings. What we need is the Thursday.
If you want to go deeper
The Fun Palace was never built, but the drawings survive, and they have the quality of something unfinished on purpose — worth seeing what a building that refused to decide what it was looks like on paper. His own question is the one this essay tries to answer: "Technology is the answer. But what was the question?” https://www.moma.org/artists/7986-cedric-price
There is a film of Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness — his argument, made walking through real homes, that buildings speak to us about who we could be. I have found it to be literally true. https://www.alaindebotton.com/architecture/watch/
Peter Zumthor rarely explains himself, which makes this Louisiana Channel interview a small gift — an hour with the architect of atmosphere, talking about different kinds of silence. https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/peter-zumthor-different-kinds-silence
99% Invisible made an episode with Eric Klinenberg about social infrastructure — why libraries, gyms, and courtyards are as real as roads and power lines, and what happens when we fund them like decoration. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-people/
Keller Easterling's essay on the zone is the free way into Extrastatecraft — her argument that the most consequential design decisions are the invisible ones: the defaults, the protocols, who has the keys. https://placesjournal.org/article/zone-the-spatial-softwares-of-extrastatecraft/
Anuradha Sachdev built and led the North America customer service experience practice at Accenture Song — one of the first teams to design and deploy agentic AI in customer service at enterprise scale. She writes about what that work revealed.