The developer had a beautiful historic building that thousands of people walked through every day. But it was completely dead to locals. It’s what planning execs called a “donut hole.”

How do you transform a block-wide donut hole into something that sparks genuine civic engagement?

The team at Juxt and I started by asking what the developer was asking: “How do we encourage civic life here?” But after months walking Philadelphia’s neighborhoods —shadowing commuters, sitting in dive bars, watching farmers markets — we realized we’d been asking the wrong question.

Philadelphia already had vibrant civic engagement. It just didn’t look like what anyone expected.

“We benchmark ourselves against New York City. People tend to think everything there is better than here.” That’s what Paul Levy, CEO of the Center City District, told me as we studied how people actually live in the city.

We discovered two distinct types: the “Urban Curious” who were actively investing in the city’s future, and the commuters who moved through it without connecting.

The Urban Curious weren’t defined by demographics, but by mindset. They expected to have a voice, and were already creating the city’s future through neighborhood gardens, pop-up markets, artist collectives.

One insight that stuck: Philadelphia had 15,000 registered nonprofits. Neighborhood groups were creating parks. The Amish at farmers markets had a strong brand people trusted. Hidden City Philadelphia was running tours for locals only.

The problem wasn’t lack of civic energy—this is where modern democracy was born! That energy, however, was scattered and disconnected from the thousands of commuters flowing through the Lits Building every day.

Instead of building another coworking space, our discovery led to urban design that surfaced the city’s existing soul—the people, organizations, and events already shaping Philadelphia’s evolution. The area would reveal the city hiding in plain sight.

Successful civic spaces don’t manufacture community. They amplify the community that’s already there, and make it visible and accessible to people who didn’t know how to find it.