DESIGNING FOR BELONGING Reimagining Cultural Spaces Where All Minds Thrive

What does it mean for a space to truly belong to everyone?

Not just to welcome but to have been shaped by the full range of minds, bodies, and ways of being that make up our communities.

Not just to open its doors wider but to ask whether the building itself was designed for the imaginary norm, and what it would take to change that.

This conference starts from a simple but radical premise: belonging is not a feeling that happens to people. It is something we design.

For cultural spaces, museums, libraries, community centres, urban regeneration sites, and the people who work within them, this is both a design challenge and a justice question. Approximately one in five people is neurodivergent. They are in our audiences, our communities, our organisations. They are often present, rarely centred, and almost never co-creating the spaces that claim to serve them.

Designing for Belonging brings together urban regenerators, cultural professionals, social innovators, educators, and neurodivergent practitioners to explore what genuine neuroinclusion looks like when it moves beyond compliance and into culture. When it stops being an add-on and starts being the foundation.

From Presence to Power

Who is in the room and who gets to shape what happens there?

There is a version of inclusion that counts bodies and ticks boxes and there is another version that fundamentally changes who holds creative and strategic power. This theme explores the difference between the two. We will look at co-design as a redistribution of authorship and what it looks like when neurodivergent people are not invited to review decisions already made, but are present from the very first question. We will examine neurodivergent leadership in cultural organisations, the structural conditions that make it possible, and what institutions need to unlearn before genuine power-sharing can take root.

The question at the heart of this theme is not "Are we including enough people?" It is "Who is actually building this?"

The Body in the Space

Belonging is felt before it is thought.

Before a visitor reads a single word of wall text, their nervous system has already made a judgment about whether this space is safe, legible, and meant for them. Lighting, acoustics, predictability, sensory load, the presence or absence of sound, these are not aesthetic choices. They are access decisions, made by default or by design.

This theme takes the nervous system seriously as a design brief. We will explore what it means to create spaces that support regulation as well as engagement, that offer both stimulation and refuge, that honour the fact that people process the world through different portals. Drawing on sensory design, trauma-informed practice, and the lived expertise of neurodivergent communities, we will ask: what does a space need to feel like in order for every mind to genuinely thrive within it?

Stories That Reflect Us

Whose stories get told and in what form, at what pace, through whose voice?

Cultural programming has long claimed to represent communities while reflecting back a surprisingly narrow version of human experience. Neurodivergent lives, when they appear at all, tend to appear as tragedy or triumph, rarely as the full, complex, contradictory, joyful, frustrated, creative reality that they are.

This theme is about narrative justice in cultural spaces. We will explore how representation shapes belonging. It is not just who appears in the story, but how the story is structured, what formats it takes, how much sensory and cognitive flexibility it allows. We will look at what it means to build programming that does not just feature neurodivergent voices but is genuinely shaped by them in its rhythm, its register, its assumptions about how meaning gets made.

Because a space that does not reflect you cannot fully belong to you.

Belonging as Infrastructure

Belonging is not a programme. It is not an awareness month or an access audit or a well-intentioned policy statement. It is an organisational culture, a set of practices, a long-term commitment to relationship and it requires infrastructure.

This theme looks at what systemic neuroinclusion actually demands of cultural organisations: how it shapes hiring and leadership, how it lives in feedback loops and evaluation frameworks, how it changes the nature of community partnership. We will examine what it takes to move from isolated moments of good practice to an organisational ecology in which neuroinclusion is not one team's responsibility but everyone's — woven into how decisions are made, how spaces are evaluated, and how trust with neurodivergent communities is built and sustained over time.

The question here is not "What have we done?" but "What have we become?"

An Invitation

This conference is for the people who sense that their institutions are capable of more - more honesty about who they serve, more courage in who they involve, more imagination in what belonging could actually look like.

It is for urban regenerators asking what it means to build communities that hold difference at their centre. For cultural professionals who want to move from good intentions to genuine transformation. For social innovators who understand that inclusion without power-sharing is just a friendlier version of the status quo.

Bring your practice, your questions, and your willingness to be changed by what you hear.

Belonging, after all, is something we build together.

Who is this for?

• Cultural professionals and programmers ready to move beyond inclusion as a checkbox.
• Urban regenerators who want communities, not just spaces.
• Social innovators asking harder questions about who gets to shape the spaces we share.
• Neurodivergent practitioners and advocates who want to co-create, not just consult.
• Educators, researchers, and policymakers working at the intersection of culture, access, and belonging.

This event is for people who believe that belonging is designed, and who want to be part of designing it.

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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT SPEAKERS AND SCHEDULE TO BE POSTED SOON!

Info: Belonging doesn't begin in the strategy document or the access audit. It begins in a conversation - one honest, human exchange where someone feels genuinely seen and part of something.
This keynote explores how Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE) are the foundation of genuine neuroinclusion. Drawing on neuroscience and real-world practice, it makes the case that positive experiences don't just feel good - they build the neurological conditions for trust, creativity, and belonging.
You don't need the perfect policy or the completed renovation. You can brew belonging right now in how you welcome someone, how you listen, and whether you ask the question that hasn't been asked yet.
Because spaces that truly belong to everyone are built one HOPEful conversation at a time.
For cultural professionals, urban regenerators, and social innovators ready to move from good intentions to genuine transformation.

Info: Parallel Workshop: As part of the Erasmus project "Reviving Urban Spaces," this workshop focuses on placing people at the heart of city transformation. The event explores practical methods for community engagement, utilizing design thinking and storytelling tools to actively listen to the territory and co-create regeneration processes with local residents. Additionally, the symposium addresses strategic cultural communication, highlighting effective ways to dialogue with the community and disseminate project results. By uniting facilitators and planners, the event provides a toolkit for transparent, inclusive, and sustainable urban development that truly reflects the needs of its inhabitants.

Info: José Antonio is a facilitator, ADHD coach, and community builder based in Amsterdam with professional experience spanning architecture, urban design, and cultural anthropology. He founded the ADHD+ Support Group Amsterdam, a peer-led community space that has grown into the highest-rated peer support initiative of its kind in the Netherlands. His work integrates systemic thinking and lived neurodivergent experience to create spaces where belonging is designed, not granted. He brings a holistic approach to community building — grounded in how attitude, presence, and vulnerability create the conditions for genuine connection across difference, as well as inform the materiality and conditions of the space.

Info: Most conversations about neuroinclusion start with what's missing. This one starts with what's working. Across urban regeneration projects, cultural institutions, and community spaces, something is shifting and this panel brings together practitioners who have been part of that change. We'll hear real stories from real spaces, explore what made genuine neuroinclusion possible, and leave with something practical to carry forward. Because the spaces that have got it right all started with the same move: they stopped designing for an imaginary norm and started designing with the full range of people who actually belong there.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

De Nieuwe Bibliotheek, 101 Stadhuisplein, Almere, Netherlands

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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