The Legible City
When I began building tools to help people think more clearly about where to live, I found that the usual metrics lost their authority rather quickly. Salary mattered, of course. So did rent, tax, healthcare, visas and transport. But once people relaxed into honesty, the questions changed. A user might start by asking which city offered the best long-term financial outlook and end by asking something much more revealing: would they be safe there as a gay person? If they developed a chronic illness, could they actually navigate the health system? If they lost their job, how catastrophic would that be under their visa conditions? Would this place reward a life organised around status, or around time? Would they be lonely there in ways they could not yet predict?
For the past few years, my work has sat at the intersection of mobility, culture and adaptation. I have coached Korean leaders at Netflix as they manage teams across Australia, Japan, Singapore and the United States. I have worked with Banco Santander in Mexico on questions that range from AI adoption to financial access in a country where most people still remain outside traditional banking. Before that, I spent a formative stretch at the Swiss sportswear company On, helping to build an international brand as it expanded rapidly across markets. The same company could look and sound entirely different depending on whether you were speaking to someone in Zurich, Yokohama or New York. The lesson has been remarkably consistent. Places and institutions tend to overestimate the value of formal systems and underestimate the force of unwritten ones. People rarely fail in a new country because they cannot buy a train ticket or open a laptop. They fail, or withdraw, because they cannot read the room. They do not know what silence means in a meeting. They do not know whether directness is prized or punished. They do not know how trust forms, how disagreement is signalled, or what kind of confidence a place rewards.
Cities make the same mistake with newcomers that companies often do. They assume that because the infrastructure is in place, the deeper work is done. The airport train runs. The metro is clean. The district is walkable. There is good coffee, fast broadband and an English-speaking coworking space. By the logic of contemporary urbanism, much has already been solved. But a city can be frictionless in the administrative sense and still feel illegible in the human one. The cities that dominate the next phase of global competition will not simply be the places with cleaner energy, better public transport and denser housing, though they will need all three. They will be the places that understand a harder truth: a city is not truly liveable if a newcomer cannot work out how to live there.
This is one of the weaknesses in the way we currently talk about urban success. We are very good at measuring the visible city. We can compare modal share, emissions, housing delivery, cycling infrastructure, healthcare access and average wages. We can produce intelligent rankings that tell us a great deal about efficiency, prosperity and environmental performance. What we are less good at measuring is civic legibility. By that I mean the ease with which a place can be interpreted and entered by someone new to it.
Every city has an operating system. Some of it is physical. It sits in the shape of the street, the width of the pavement, the frequency of the tram and the quality of the public benches. Much of it is social. It lives in the habits and permissions of a place. Who lingers in public and who passes through. Which cafés tolerate a laptop and which are clearly for conversation. Whether people of different ages share space or retreat into their own zones. Whether the library feels genuinely public or technically available but socially coded. Whether a market invites participation or merely consumption. Some cities offer newcomers a series of low-risk entry points into urban life. Others ask them to decode too much too quickly.
I have seen versions of this problem everywhere I have lived. I grew up in Ireland and have spent much of my adult life elsewhere, moving through the UK, the US, Germany, Switzerland and now Spain. I know the particular seduction of a city that performs well on first contact. London gives itself to you through pace and promise. New York flatters ambition. Zurich can feel almost impossibly competent. Valencia, where I now spend much of my time, offers a public ease that many richer cities have misplaced. Each has its own deal with the resident. Each asks a different question in return. At times, the challenge is not access but translation. Singapore, for instance, can appear almost perfectly navigable to an outsider. The systems are clear, the public realm is orderly, the transport excellent. Yet beneath that apparent legibility are more complex layers of cultural life, hierarchy and social segmentation. During a visit to INSEAD’s Singapore campus earlier this year, I spent time discussing the difference between formal multiculturalism and actual integration. Chinese Singaporeans, mainland Chinese, Malays, Indians and expatriate communities may share a city but not always the same social pathways through it. A place can be efficient enough to impress the visitor and still remain stubbornly difficult to enter in any deeper sense.
That gap between formal access and felt participation has become one of the defining questions of urban life. We are living through a period in which cities increasingly compete not just for tourists or investors but for long-term residents with options. Students, founders, researchers, remote workers, designers, engineers and operators do not simply choose countries now. They choose particular urban environments. And yet many cities still market themselves with a checklist that feels ten years out of date. They lead with innovation districts, transport links, quality of life rankings, perhaps a few sustainability credentials and a strong espresso scene. All useful. None sufficient.
What people want to know is whether a city can absorb a life. This is where my own tool-building became unexpectedly clarifying. I had assumed users would optimise for income and climate with a little lifestyle preference layered on top. In fact, many were trying to model something more serious: resilience. They wanted to understand what would happen if life became less linear than the relocation brochures assume. If the job ended. If a relationship did. If a parent needed care. If their identity made them visible in ways that mattered. If they wanted children. If they did not. Cities that understand this will be better placed for the next decade than those that continue to think only in terms of attraction. Attraction gets people through the door. Retention requires a more holisitc proposition.
City life is built through public space, certainly, but also through institutions that lower the threshold for entry. Libraries matter here, not as nostalgic symbols but as practical civic tools. So do municipal sports facilities, neighbourhood markets, public pools, local festivals, adult education courses and cultural venues that do not require insider confidence to enter. These are the places where the newcomer learns not through formal orientation but through repeated exposure. This is how a city explains itself. Walkability matters for the same reason. The most persuasive argument for walkable urbanism is usually environmental or health-related, and rightly so. But there is another case for it, one that is less often foregrounded. Walking is a way of reading. It lets a newcomer absorb sequence, tone and rhythm. Which bakery has queues at 8.00 and which at 11.00. Which square belongs to pensioners in the morning and children in the afternoon. Which streets are merely pretty and which are actually inhabited. A car-dependent city with privatised leisure and long commutes may function; it is simply much harder to learn.
This is one reason why certain Southern European cities continue to outperform their balance sheets in the realm of daily life. They have retained a confidence in shared public existence that many wealthier northern counterparts struggle to reproduce. A square in Madrid or Valencia that accommodates old men talking, teenagers hovering, children kicking a ball and couples drinking coffee is doing far more civic work than its landscaping budget might suggest. It is teaching something about permission. That does not mean romanticising dysfunction. No one relocates for late bureaucracy or inaccessible housing. The point is that high-performing cities often mistake polish for hospitality. They optimise visible systems but neglect the social ramps that help people enter the place without feeling perpetually peripheral. English-language service alone is not a welcome strategy. Nor is a startup district filled with short-term residents and expensive salad. If a city wants committed newcomers, it must make participation visible.
There is also a hard-nosed economic case for all this. Places that fail to turn arrivals into participants eventually lose them. International talent may stay professionally useful for a period while remaining socially detached. This weakens the urban fabric in ways that rarely show up immediately in policy briefings. Innovation depends not only on universities, capital and office space but on trust, weak ties and informal exchange. A city that is difficult to enter socially is one that will struggle to hold its most enterprising residents for the long term. So what should cities do? The answers are less glamorous than many may hope. Make the public realm generous enough for lingering. Protect neighbourhood institutions that allow low-stakes repeat contact. Invest in libraries and sports facilities with the seriousness usually reserved for flagship cultural projects. Simplify bureaucracy. Build mixed-use districts where daily life can be observed and joined. Treat markets, festivals and civic rituals as infrastructure rather than decoration. Ensure that beauty and coherence are not luxuries but part of how the city teaches itself to those who arrive. Most of all, city leaders should ask better questions. Not simply, how do we attract talent? Not even, how do we improve liveability? But something more precise: If a stranger arrived tomorrow, how long would it take before they understood how to belong here?
The future sustainable city will need all the measurable intelligence we already discuss so confidently: clean energy, compact form, public transport, high-performance buildings, climate resilience. But the memorable city, the one that earns loyalty rather than passing admiration, will add something else. It will reduce social friction as carefully as it reduces carbon.
