Belonging and Community

Contexts systemic design journal publishes relevant studies and is a space for presentation and dialogue for emerging and controversial work.

The right to the city is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville and that has been reclaimed more recently by social movements, thinkers and several progressive local authorities alike as a call to action to reclaim the city as a co-created space—a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism have had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries.

A community is a social unit with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliati...

A gurukula or gurukulam was a type of education system in ancient India with shishya living near or with the guru, in the same house. The guru-shishya tradition is a sacred one in Hinduism and appears in other religious groups in India, such as Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. The word gurukula is a combination of the Sanskrit words guru and kula. Before the arrival of British rule, they served as South Asia's primary educational system. The term is also used today to refer to residential monasteries or schools operated by modern gurus. The proper plural of the term is gurukulam, though guruk...