May Network Call: Urban Villaging
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What does it look like to recreate the good bits of village life in a big, busy city? In this session, Jocelyn Endres invites us to reflect on how great friendships grow in an urban environment.
✨ TLDR summary
We explored what it actually takes to build village-like belonging in a city — not through grand design, but through small, intentional moves. Themes of consistency, third spaces, geographic closeness, and explicit mutual support agreements came up again and again. The good news: a lot of us are already doing this. The call was a prompt to notice it, name it, and do more of it.
🌿 Urban Villaging
Jocelyn opened with a question she’s been sitting with: as her social fabric in Berlin has grown richer over five years, it hasn’t felt like a coincidence. A cluster of intentional moves — by her, and by people around her — seem to have created something that feels increasingly village-like. She wanted to explore whether there are patterns in how this happens, and whether they’re replicable.
The inspiration: Priya Rose’s blog post on how she and 22 friends gradually moved within walking distance of each other in the same city (the Fractal community). Jocelyn noticed the same thing starting to happen around her in Berlin — and wanted to name it and learn from it collectively.
The frame isn’t “cities are bad, villages are better.” Cities offer real gifts: anonymity, reinvention, diversity. But they also carry a loneliness burden that many of us feel. Urban villaging is about consciously weaving in what’s missing, without having to leave.
🔑 Patterns & Moves that Make Urban Villages Real
This was the richest part of the call. Groups swapped stories of things that had actually worked. Here’s what emerged:
1. Third Spaces with Consistent Rhythm
Almost every example of community forming happened around a third space — not someone’s home, not a workplace, but a semi-public place with its own values. And every single one had regularity. Examples shared:
Church of Interbeing (Berlin) — a semi-public space defined by shared values, open to anyone curious, where people are actively forming friendships
A 30-year Wednesday dinner in a hotel kitchen in Italy — held weekly for decades, a fixture people organise their lives around
A weekly improv theatre night in Berlin — ran for years and built a community, though it eventually grew too big to hold intimacy (a useful warning)
A weekly brunch in Porto at Portal — with an organised resource guide (cafes, housing costs, local tips) to help people actually move there
The insight: consistency creates habit, and habit creates belonging. One person planting their flag and saying “I’m doing this every week, you’re all invited” has more power than a group vote. Don’t wait for consensus — just start.
2. Living Close to Your Friends (Deliberately)
Multiple people flagged this as quietly transformative. When friends live within walking distance:
Spontaneity becomes possible — you can just show up, or invite someone over without it being An Event
Your friend’s home starts to feel like your home — the city itself becomes more intimate
Several people in Porto have given each other keys to their apartments — the “sitcom effect,” as Yianni described it: you’re in your living room and someone wanders in, and it’s fun
Jocelyn noted this is exactly what Priya Rose wrote about — it doesn’t happen by accident, it requires actually choosing where you live with social fabric in mind.
3. “Co-worming”
Maeby (Berlin) named something many people do informally but rarely frame as community-building: doing nothing-in-particular at a friend’s place. Not a dinner, not an event — just being a warm body on someone’s couch while they do admin and you read. Low-stakes, low-effort, high-intimacy over time. It lowers the barrier to socialization enormously.
4. The Power of One Attractor Event
Alongside slow, consistent relationship-building, there’s also the singular event with ripple effects. Jocelyn shared how Rich once invited everyone he knew in Berlin — including MicroSolidarity summer camp people — to the Life Itself Hub. She met half her current friend group there. Someone who didn’t even live in Berlin acted as a connector node, and the network fused.
Similarly, someone in one group shared that their very gregarious friend threw a big party specifically to introduce a more introverted person to their network — and it became a seminal moment.
5. The Open Door Policy
One person’s neighbour operates with a simple rule: between 8am and 8pm, anyone can knock on my door. No need to schedule, no need to negotiate. That kind of declared openness invites spontaneity without overwhelming anyone.
The flipside came up too: you need to be comfortable saying no. If you’re scared to turn someone away, an open-door culture becomes a trap. Enough familiarity to say “not today” without it feeling like rejection is essential. Ilja noted this, and Yianni confirmed that in Porto, after an initial burst of spontaneous visits, things settled into a natural equilibrium.
6. Explicit Mutual Support Agreements
Adrian (Berlin) shared something powerful: he’s made informal but explicit agreements with a small group of friends that they are available to each other for support. Anyone can send a message saying “I need someone — is anyone available?” and others can either step forward or say no. And crucially: saying no is not a rejection. It’s just a boundary.
Jocelyn echoed this with another example — a friend called Johnson who has a “Support Legion” of 30 people. He can message the group asking who has 15 minutes, and someone always responds. The pre-agreed structure removes the friction and shame of asking for help.
7. Ecosystem Thinking
Maeby’s group talked about paying attention to the different strengths, weaknesses, and needs of people in your network — and noticing how they fit together. The friend who’s great with people helps the more introverted friend with visibility. The person who’s great at logistics helps the creative person with follow-through. Rather than trying to create a community of clones, lean into the complementarity.
Priya's blog: