Making room for people in the city

Cities are designed around movement. Roads connect destinations, sidewalks carry pedestrians, and public spaces are often defined by what people are expected to do within them.

But what about the spaces in between? The overlooked setbacks, street edges, and everyday corners that people pass without a reason to stay?

Behind the City begins with these spaces.

We study how the built environment influences everyday experience and translate what we find into small, repeatable urban interventions.

The idea isn't to create one better public space. It's to develop a way of creating them, again and again.

THE METHOD- Read what the city leaves out

Every intervention begins with understanding a place.

We observe how people move, where they gather, which spaces they avoid, and how the physical environment shapes their experience.

Our research is guided by five psychological lenses: restoration, safety, belonging, legibility, and autonomy.

Together, these lenses help us identify what a street offers, what it lacks, and where an intervention might make a difference.

The findings inform everything that follows, from choosing a location to deciding what happens within it. Rather than applying the same solution everywhere, we begin with the needs and conditions of each place.

THE INTERVENTION- Small in footprint. Designed to be repeated.

MindStop is the first physical application of this approach.

A modular urban space that can be assembled, relocated, and adapted to different locations, MindStop introduces opportunities to pause, participate, and connect within everyday surroundings.

The structure provides a recognisable framework. The experience changes.

One MindStop might offer art or creative activities. Another might invite reading, games, conversation, or simply a place to sit.

Each deployment begins with identifying a suitable location and working with property owners, institutions, or relevant authorities to secure the necessary permissions. Accessibility, pedestrian movement, safety, and maintenance are considered before installation.

The intention is to work within the existing city, using spaces responsibly rather than building something entirely new.

The experience is always free to use.

From idea to first deployment.

Our first MindStop was tested along ITPL Road in Bangalore as part of The 15-Minute Mind.

Over three hours, approximately 150 people engaged with the intervention, and 89 participants shared feedback.

Among survey respondents, 40.4% reported feeling calmer, while 95.5% said they would stop at a space like this again.

The pilot offered an early indication of how people respond when an ordinary street edge becomes a place to spend time.

It also gave us something more valuable than a finished installation: a starting point for testing, learning, and improving the system.

THE ECOSYSTEM- A different way to bring public experiences into the city.

Making MindStops repeatable requires more than design. It requires a way to bring spaces, people, and resources together.

Behind the City is developing a commercial partnership model that allows brands, businesses, institutions, property owners, and local collaborators to participate in creating these spaces.

Brands can support MindStop activations through experiential partnerships, introducing activities, products, or services in ways that are relevant to the people using them.

Property owners and institutions can help make suitable locations available. Local businesses, artists, and facilitators can contribute experiences that respond to the surrounding community.

Behind the City brings these relationships together, leading the research, design, deployment, programming, and evaluation.

For participating organisations, MindStop creates opportunities to engage with people beyond conventional advertising.

For the public, it creates a place to pause and participate without having to purchase anything or engage with a brand.

The partnerships support the space. They do not determine who gets to use it.

This is how we intend to move beyond individual installations toward a network that can sustain itself through ongoing commercial partnerships.

THE NEXT PHASE

10 MindStops. 3 months.

Our next goal is to carry out ten MindStop deployments over three months.

Building on the first three-hour pilot, the next phase is planned around full-day activations across different locations, activities, and partnerships.

10 — Target deployments

8+ — Planned hours per activation

4,000 — Target participant engagements

The participation target is based on an illustrative average of 400 engagements per full-day activation. It is a projection, not a measured outcome, and may include repeat visits.

The next phase will allow us to test how the same modular system performs across different urban conditions, how activities influence participation, and how partnerships can support repeated deployments.

It will also help establish the practical foundations of a larger network: securing locations, managing costs, reusing infrastructure, maintaining spaces, and measuring outcomes.

The goal is not simply to install more MindStops.

It is to develop a system that becomes easier to deploy, adapt, and sustain with every iteration.

THE NETWORK- A place to pause, every 15 minutes

The long-term vision behind The 15-Minute Mind is simple: what if, wherever you were walking in the city, you could reach a place to pause within approximately 15 minutes?

Rather than concentrating opportunities for rest and interaction in a handful of parks or designated destinations, we envision a distributed network of small, accessible spaces woven into everyday pedestrian routes.

MindStops would be placed at strategic intervals, informed by walking distances, pedestrian movement, surrounding uses, and the needs of each neighbourhood.

The 15-minute interval is a guiding ambition, not a fixed spacing rule. Each location would respond to its own urban conditions and available spaces.

MindStop introduces individual places to stop.

MindLane explores how these spaces could connect along pedestrian routes and neighbourhood corridors, creating a more continuous experience across the city.

MindCredits is a proposed incentive system that could connect optional participation with rewards, services, and experiences offered by local businesses.

These ideas are at different stages of development, but they share a common direction: bringing spatial design, community participation, and commercial partnerships into one adaptable urban system. A system that can begin with one street, grow through a neighbourhood, and eventually be adapted to other cities.

BUILD WITH US

The next MindStop begins with a place and the people willing to make it happen.

We're looking for brands, businesses, property owners, institutions, and local collaborators interested in bringing MindStops to new locations.

Whether you have a suitable space, want to develop an activation, or see an opportunity for your organisation to become part of the network, we'd like to hear from you.