A public event series by STIR x Roca London Gallery, in partnership with London Design Festival 2026
The Architecture of Belonging is a two-part public event series curated by STIR, exploring how architecture shapes, challenges, and redefines our sense of belonging. The series brings together creative practitioners across architecture, design, curatorship, film, art and performance — each speaking from and about the spaces between belonging and exclusion, memory and erasure, arrival and home.
Every city that gets built encodes a set of assumptions about who belongs in it, whose movement is anticipated, whose presence is designed for, whose memory is worth preserving. Unbuilt names the architecture that has never been commissioned — the cities never imagined for certain people, the futures never allowed to exist.
Belonging is at the centre of this session not as a critique of its absence alone, but as a positive claim, a right, and a design brief. For Session 2, the series scales up from the intimate, embodied threshold of In-Between to the civic, political, and propositional. The question is no longer what it feels like to live in the in-between but what we build when we finally design ‘belonging’ in.
Four practitioners take the stage in turn, each offering a speculative dispatch from a different version of the unbuilt city — political, structural, spatial, embodied. Offering pictures of what could (and should) exist.
Followed by an open conversation that asks: so how do we build the unbuilt now?