This book reframes city-making as a collaborative cultural process—shaped by stories, rituals, and relationships, not just bricks and regulations. It offers a vocabulary and set of practices for embedding empathy, pluralism, and public imagination into civic infrastructure, directly aligning with The Change Lab’s mission of building social cohesion and systemic change from the ground up.

Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods makes a powerful case that some of our biggest national challenges — disconnection, distrust, division — are playing out most clearly in our neighborhoods. And more importantly, that these same neighborhoods hold the answers we’ve been searching for.

He doesn’t offer quick fixes. Instead, he invites us to zoom in — to the street, the school, the church, the local nonprofit — and ask: How strong are the relationships here? Who feels seen? Who’s left out? It’s a deeply human approach that resonates with everything we’re trying to do at The Change Lab.