Communities at the Core of Urban Life: What Are We Missing?

Elmira Karmanova, Chief Project Manager, CRA

The oral history of the steppe rarely forms a single, linear narrative: it is preserved in family memories, place names, routes, objects, and voices that complement one another. A құрақ көрпе («patchwork quilt,» author’s note) can be read as a material embodiment of this kind of memory: individual fragments retain their own texture and become part of a larger pattern only through precise connections. In discussing the city’s social infrastructure, this is more than a decorative metaphor.

Almaty, as a metropolis, is likewise composed of fragments that emerged at different times and according to different logics: libraries, youth community centers, universities, cultural institutions, civil society organizations, professional associations, and local initiatives. Each has its own institutional history, working language, audience, and understanding of what constitutes a result. These differences are natural and, in many respects, valuable. The real question is how effectively the city can connect them into a functioning system.

In the Almaty Development Program, youth community centers are viewed not merely as venues for events and consultations: the expected outcome is linked to improving the social well-being of young Almaty residents and increasing their participation in the city’s socio-economic life. In the section on culture, next-generation libraries are described as multifunctional public «places for living,» while cultural programming is associated with strengthening social ties, developing neighborhoods, and integrating new residents into Almaty’s cultural environment. The common idea behind these formulations is important: the result lies not in the mere existence of a venue, nor even in the number of programs delivered, but in what happens to a person through their interaction with it. Do they gain knowledge and support? Do they form new connections, find an opportunity to join an existing initiative, or propose one of their own? This level of urban work deserves particular attention: there is always a path between an opportunity that has been created and a person’s actual participation—a path that still needs to be seen, understood, and designed.

Almaty has already created strong components of this infrastructure. The next challenge is more complex: learning to see and manage the connections between them. Managing connections does not mean forcing libraries, community centers, universities, and civil society organizations into a single model or a unified calendar. What matters more is understanding how a person moves between different opportunities, where that journey works, where it breaks down, and why. At the next level of maturity, it is no longer enough to know how many events took place. The system must be able to formulate hypotheses about which mechanisms genuinely help people participate in urban life, observe participants’ real experiences, identify outcomes that differ from expectations, and adjust decisions based on what has been learned. At present, residents still have to do much of this work themselves. A person may receive advice in one place, happen to learn about a suitable program somewhere else, search for a venue for a small initiative in a third place, and each time explain again who they are, what they need, and what they have already done. Formally, there are many opportunities. In practice, navigating between them often remains the resident’s own responsibility—and can be far from simple.

City reporting captures the individual components well: the number of venues, visits, events, consultations, and program participants. What is much harder to see is the quality of the connections. Did a person return after the first contact? Did they form relationships that continued beyond a particular event? Were they able to join a regular group, propose their own topic, or move on to a partner program? Can a group that has formed continue operating after a project ends or a strong leader leaves? And, finally, what does the system itself do when it discovers that an expected transition did not occur?

The last question is especially important. Strong social infrastructure is not defined by the absence of failures. It is defined by the ability to notice them and use them as a basis for changing a program. Attendance indicates accessibility. The number of services delivered indicates scale. But if a city wants to foster engagement, belonging, and resilient communities, another level of analysis is needed: how well the system connects people, knowledge, institutions, and opportunities—and whether it can learn from the points where those connections fail.

A City Is Learned Twice

First, a person learns the functional city: they find housing and work, choose a school, register with a clinic, and memorize transport routes. Gradually, they no longer need to check a map before every journey.

Social Almaty reveals itself more slowly. Where can someone find a professional circle beyond their own workplace? Where can they take a small idea that is not yet ready for registering an organization, preparing documents, or seeking funding? How can they meet people in their neighborhood when communication among neighbors is focused mainly on utility and maintenance issues? How can they enter an established circle without remaining an outsider for months? These questions illustrate the difference between the existence of urban infrastructure and a person’s actual ability to become part of it.

Being a new resident is a temporary condition in a person’s relationship with the city. Adaptation does not end with paperwork and learning the transport system. It becomes visible when familiar places emerge, along with several lasting contacts, experience of joint activity, and an understanding of the unwritten rules of urban life.

The Almaty Development Program uses the phrase «cultural absorption of new residents.» The term may sound cumbersome, but the task it describes is important: the urban environment should create opportunities for new residents to participate in the city’s cultural and civic life.

At the same time, a separate club for newcomers addresses only part of the challenge. A person’s status as a newcomer fades more quickly in a mixed environment: a conversation club, professional association, parents’ group, library program, neighborhood research project, or small volunteer initiative. In such settings, people are connected not by a shared biography but by a common interest or joint action—and joint action often becomes the key moment in adaptation. A person begins to be recognized; they develop direct contacts with people they can turn to rather than relying only on formal systems. They gain experience in which they can contribute something to the urban environment, rather than merely receive a service from it.

For Almaty, the adaptation of new residents is only one example that helps reveal the mechanism. Similar logic applies when a teenager first enters civic life, a graduate seeks a professional network, a young parent rebuilds social ties, or a service recipient gradually becomes the author of their own initiative. In all these scenarios, the transition between two states matters. The city can provide the first opportunity, but deeper participation depends on whether there is a clear next step.

This is why people’s journeys can become one of the most useful sources of knowledge about social infrastructure. Instead of an abstract «target audience,» the focus is on a specific path: what brought the person in, where they received initial support, what made them return, where they connected with others, what new role they were able to take on, and at what point the journey broke down.

This perspective changes the very object of management. It becomes possible to analyze not only the performance of an individual institution, but also the quality of transitions between institutions. Physical infrastructure reduces the distance to a service. Social infrastructure should reduce the distance between a person and the opportunity to participate.

A Space Can Be Busy and Still Remain Socially Empty

An urban venue has obvious signs of life: open doors, visitors, a schedule, event photographs, and completed reporting tables. All of this is necessary, but a high level of activity does not yet show what relationships emerged within the space or what remained after the program ended.

For managing social infrastructure, it is useful to distinguish several levels.

A space provides access. A person understands where it is, how to enter, whether they can stay without significant expense, and what opportunities are available to them.

A service addresses a specific need. Legal advice helps resolve a legal issue; career counseling helps identify a direction for a job search; a library provides a book or needed information. For a high-quality service, a single contact may sometimes be entirely sufficient.

A program adds time. Several meetings are connected by a shared purpose. This makes it possible to observe changes that cannot be seen after a single visit: a person develops a new skill, tries to apply it, returns, and receives feedback.

A community adds relationships and a distributed capacity to act. People get to know one another, communicate between meetings, help new participants, suggest content, and take on part of the responsibility. The organizer remains important but ceases to be the sole center through which all activity passes.

The next level emerges when these elements begin to function as part of an urban system. A library, community center, university, employer, cultural institution, and civil society organization cease to appear to the individual as separate doors. Real pathways emerge between them—pathways known not only to managers and the authors of memoranda, but also to staff who work directly with people.

This is where another unit of analysis appears: the transition.

A transition has occurred when, after a consultation, a person receives more than the name of another organization and understands exactly where to go. When a participant in an open event enters a regular program. When a small group gains access to a venue or a partner. When a library can direct a person to a place where their need can genuinely be taken forward. When the first organization understands what happened next and uses that information to improve its own work. Such a transition is one of the «seams» of social infrastructure.

Conflating different levels creates inflated expectations of some formats and obscures the value of others. A public lecture may provide important knowledge and fully accomplish its purpose. A legal consultation may be successful after a single visit. A job fair can be assessed by whether it results in employment. Each format has its own logic of outcomes.

But where the goal is engagement, belonging, and collective action, a single event is no longer enough for evaluation. It is important to understand what happened next. Did the person receive a concrete next step? Did they return? Did a regular group emerge? Did they connect with other participants? Can they propose their own topic? Is it clear what support a small initiative can receive? This raises a fundamental management question: what does the venue do when the expected continuation does not happen?

High attendance with almost no return visits. A strong program after which participants do not interact with one another. A strong group that has stopped admitting new people. A partnership between institutions that exists on paper but creates no real transitions for residents. Such cases should be treated not only as weak outcomes, but as information indicating that the original assumption about how the program works needs to be tested.

The maturity of social infrastructure, therefore, is not determined by the number of flawless projects. Far more important is the system’s ability to notice discrepancies between expected and actual outcomes, analyze them, and change its decisions. Almaty already has a great deal of activity. The next question is how effectively the city can turn that activity into connections—and the experience of those connections into knowledge for the next decision.

Large Events and Small Groups Serve Different Purposes

Reach is essential for an urban program: it shows that a venue is visible, accessible, and capable of attracting a broad audience. A large-scale event can quickly introduce hundreds of people to a new opportunity, topic, or organization, take an initiative beyond its usual circle, and attract those who had not previously known about it.

A small regular group serves a different function. It provides something large events almost never can: time. Participants begin to know one another, a shared history develops, trust and agreements emerge, and responsibility is gradually distributed. People cease to be merely an audience and begin to influence the content of what is happening.

Both formats are valuable to the urban system. The result, however, depends largely on whether a transition exists between them. If a large event ends with the final photograph and a generic «follow our updates,» the next cycle has to begin almost from scratch with an unfamiliar audience. A regular group faces the opposite risk: without contact with open formats, it gradually becomes less visible within the neighborhood, reproduces the same membership, and loses its ability to renew itself.

For this reason, a venue’s calendar is best viewed not simply as a list of events of different sizes. It should reveal an architecture of participation. What can a person do after the first encounter? Where does a more regular format appear? What opportunity opens for someone ready to engage more deeply? Is there a place for a participant who is already able to propose their own topic or take responsibility for part of the work?

Sometimes such a transition can indeed be created through a small intervention. After a public meeting, a specific follow-up session is offered to those who want to continue. A consultation participant receives the contact details of an active program and a person who is expecting them there. After an educational event, a small group is formed where the knowledge gained can be put into practice.

Taken separately, these actions may seem too small for an urban strategy. Yet user journeys often depend precisely on them. This is where the city begins to see the difference between reach as an end result and reach as an entry point into a more complex system of participation.

A Strong Core Can Eventually Close the Door

A resilient community needs memory, and this is usually held by regular participants: they know the context, maintain agreements, preserve relationships, take responsibility, and can continue the work between formal meetings. Without such a core, a group remains a series of isolated events for a long time.

But resilience creates its own risk. The longer people work together, the more unspoken elements emerge within the community: its own language, familiar roles, internal stories, informal rules, and an established circle of trust. For existing participants, these are signs of maturity. For a newcomer, the very same elements can become barriers.

This is why a community’s openness cannot be assessed solely by whether new participants are technically allowed to attend. What matters more is what happens after they enter. Do they understand how the group works? Who helps them settle in? Can they ask a simple question without feeling that they arrived long after the conversation began? Are they given an opportunity to take part in a concrete action? Can they eventually influence the content, or have all meaningful roles already been allocated to those who were there earlier?

For a professional team, this is one of the most subtle indicators of development. A strong core ensures continuity, but the system must simultaneously create opportunities for renewal. Sometimes this means reconsidering a convenient format, opening new roles, changing the way decisions are made, or deliberately creating situations in which long-standing and new participants work together.

This also creates a useful evaluation signal. If a community demonstrates strong regularity but has almost stopped admitting new people, this does not necessarily indicate successful resilience. The system may have encountered a new challenge that did not exist at the launch stage. Maturity is demonstrated by the ability to notice this change and adjust the work accordingly.

A Network Needs Standards; Neighborhoods Need Different Programs

An urban system cannot depend exclusively on the experience, personality, and intuition of individual managers. Common requirements are needed for accessibility, safety, quality of support, staff professionalism, and outcome evaluation.

But a common quality standard does not require identical content. Alatau, Medeu, and Turksib districts differ in their built environment, social structure, age profile, migration dynamics, cultural infrastructure, and the density of existing initiatives. The same calendar may therefore feel organic in one area and almost arbitrary in another.

This changes the very meaning of scaling. Rather than scaling a fixed set of ready-made events, the city would benefit more from scaling a venue’s capacity to study its own territory, formulate a working hypothesis, create a clear entry point for participants, support groups, record outcomes, and revise decisions.

In a new residential area, the central task may be to build the first neighborly ties among recently relocated families. Near universities, the focus may be professional communities, mentoring, and project teams. In an established district, strong local associations may already exist and may not need a new program at all; what they need is space, partners, modest organizational support, or access to the city system.

Here it is easy to fall into the trap of visible success. A format that performs well at one venue naturally invites rapid replication elsewhere. But trust between people, the personality of the facilitator, the group’s history, its network of partners, and the social context in which the outcome emerged cannot be transferred automatically along with the program.

After a successful pilot, therefore, the key question is not only «Can this program be replicated?» It is more useful to understand which mechanism worked and under what conditions. What is transferable may not be the format itself, but a principle: regularity, a mixed participant group, the opportunity for joint action, the way newcomers are included, or the presence of a specific local partner.

The Almaty Development Program envisions a polycentric city model in which different centers should have their own social, cultural, and business content. This principle is particularly important for social infrastructure. Districts do not need to become alike. What should be shared is the professional capacity to work with different contexts and turn local experience into knowledge accessible to the entire urban network. What scales, then, is not a successful event. What scales is the system’s capacity to learn.

The Leader Without Whom Nothing Happens

Almost every vibrant community begins with a person who invests more time and energy in its existence and development than everyone else. They bring participants together, maintain communication, know the partners, remember previous agreements, and are often the first to notice when something begins to go wrong.

At the launch stage, this concentration is useful; later, it can become a systemic vulnerability. If participant journeys, partner contacts, the history of decisions, and the knowledge of why a program is structured in a particular way exist only in one person’s head, that person’s departure means losing far more than a single employee. The group may continue meeting while its institutional memory has already been lost.

Community resilience, therefore, is not only about distributing responsibilities. It is also about distributing knowledge.

One participant can welcome newcomers, another can lead a particular area of work, a third can maintain partnerships, and a fourth can facilitate meetings. The team understands what decisions were made in the past and why; experience from successful and unsuccessful formats is retained and used in the next cycle.

This is a significant distinction between community management and event management. An administrator keeps the space functioning; a producer is responsible for program quality; a community manager works with relationships, group roles, conflicts, the integration of newcomers, the transfer of responsibility, and the community’s ability to act without constant hands-on management.

In practice, these functions may be performed by one person. For an urban system, however, it is important to see them separately. Otherwise, community development remains a side effect of having a strong employee: while that person is there, everything works; after they leave, the work has to begin again. Good community management leaves behind not dependency, but the community’s ability to continue its activities and remain resilient.

Hypothesis First, Calendar Second

Social projects often follow a familiar sequence: idea, budget, plan, calendar, implementation, report. Between the idea and the plan, however, the most important professional question often disappears: why do we assume that these particular actions will lead to the desired change?

The Tamarack Institute in Canada, a charitable organization founded in 2001, offers collective initiatives a tool that can be described as a framework for change. It is a shared working hypothesis about how a team expects to change an existing situation. It links the problem, the desired change, the chosen approach, available opportunities, and signs of progress. For an individual urban venue, such a framework can fit on a single working page. Its value lies not in the document’s length, but in making the team’s assumptions visible.

Suppose a community center is located in an area of active residential development. New residents have already learned the transport system, shops, schools, and everyday services, but interact little beyond family and work. The phrase «increase community engagement» is almost useless here. It does not help determine what program should be launched or what outcome should be considered meaningful.

A working description can be more specific: within a year, some new residents should develop local contacts, a familiar public place, experience of joint activity, and a clear way to propose an initiative of their own.

Next comes the hypothesis. For example: lasting local ties emerge more quickly in small, regular groups where new and long-term residents work together on a shared practical task than through a series of separate information events. The calendar then ceases to be the starting point and becomes a tool for testing the hypothesis.

Neighborhood research, a conversation club, the creation of a cultural route, a local archive, a group for young parents, or a volunteer practice are selected not simply because they appear interesting in themselves. What matters is whether they create the conditions assumed by the original hypothesis: repeat contact, a mixed group of participants, joint action, and the emergence of new relationships and roles.

Another professional agreement is also needed—one that projects often lack. The team should understand in advance not only the signs of success, but also the grounds for revising its hypothesis.

What would make us acknowledge that the chosen mechanism did not work? For example, people may willingly attend the first meeting but almost never return; or they may return but communicate exclusively with the facilitator. Joint projects may emerge only under constant pressure from the organizer. New and long-term residents may be present in the same room but effectively remain two separate groups, with all connections disappearing six months later when the program ends.

These are most likely not inconvenient data that spoil a report. They are the most valuable information about the quality of the original assumption. In this approach, a pilot ceases to be a smaller version of a program that the city has already decided to scale. A pilot becomes a way to generate new knowledge.

At the end of a pilot, it is important to know more than the number of participants. What was confirmed? What proved incorrect? For whom did the mechanism work, and for whom did it not? What local conditions influenced the outcome? What needs to change before the next cycle? Which elements can be transferred to another venue, and which should remain tied to the local context?

After several cycles, the city develops not merely a collection of cases but accumulated knowledge about the mechanisms of social change. This is where a framework for change becomes part of a more mature urban management model: it allows the system to compare expectations with reality, identify anomalies, and adjust actions rather than defend a plan simply because it was once approved.

This is especially important for social infrastructure: people, communities, and neighborhoods change faster than most long-term programs can be updated. A resilient system, therefore, is not one that once discovered the correct model, but one that can regularly test its own decisions and learn as the environment changes.

Empathy You Can See in the Schedule

Empathy is often treated as a personal quality of an employee: the ability to listen, show attention, and avoid formulaic responses. For an urban system, that is not enough. The quality of access should not depend on how empathetic the person on duty happens to be that day. Empathy becomes a professional property of the system when the user’s experience is built into the design of the service from the outset.

A person may not know the exact name of their problem, may not understand an institution’s internal structure, may have limited proficiency in one of the languages, or may feel uncomfortable speaking in front of a group. They may also work during the hours when most events take place, arrive with a child, or receive a useful consultation and never return simply because no one explained what could happen next. These circumstances are easy to label as «audience characteristics.» For design purposes, however, they are data.

Attention to a person’s real experience is reflected in clear navigation, a simple first-visit process, accessible registration, the ability to describe a need in one’s own words, a choice of times, multilingual materials, and the quality of the next contact. In the developed guidelines for improving library services, the user journey is framed in highly practical terms: it should be easy for a person to enter, understand, receive help, and return. Multilingualism is treated as service infrastructure—prepared materials, navigation, staff training, and partnerships—rather than as the personal merit of an individual employee.

Community development programs require another layer. A person needs help not only to receive a service, but also to learn how to participate. Who will introduce them to others? How will the group’s unwritten rules be explained? Is there a safe first role that does not immediately require public speaking or proposing a project? Do they understand what they can do next?

Even a very welcoming space can remain socially impenetrable to a newcomer. Attention to a person’s real experience can therefore be seen in the very design of the program. Meetings are held not only when convenient for staff; a person with a child is not automatically excluded from participation; a newcomer is given time to understand the context. After a complex consultation, everyone receives a clear next step rather than a long list of links. This is no longer merely a question of friendliness. It is an architecture of access and one of the indicators of social infrastructure quality.

The Library: The Strength of a Familiar Address

A city library possesses an asset that a new venue may take years to build: recognition, a permanent address, institutional memory, trust, and the ability to enter and remain without first having to prove that one has a problem or is ready to participate in a project.

This is why the public role of a library should not be built around trying to turn it into a universal social center. It is far more effective to develop the functions that are organic to the institution itself: knowledge, reading, language, local memory, access to information, and calm public presence.

A library can introduce new residents to the history and contemporary opportunities of their district, host conversation clubs, build a local archive, provide space for small groups, help people navigate cultural and educational programs, and connect a person with an organization capable of taking their request further.

The logic of the urban system is especially visible in this last function. A strong library does not need to solve every social need itself. It should understand the limits of its own competence and know where a person’s journey can continue.

A library also has another quality that rarely appears in performance indicators but matters for social infrastructure: it allows low-threshold participation. A person can first simply come in—sit, borrow a book, observe a group, listen to a conversation, and return another time. They are not required immediately to fill out a form, call themselves an activist, formulate an initiative, or assume obligations.

This calm entry is especially important for people who are not yet ready for more intensive participation. Belonging rarely begins with the declaration, «I am now a member of this community.» More often, it develops much more quietly: through repeated presence, familiar faces, and the gradual sense that this place accepts you without preconditions.

This function is particularly valuable in new districts, where physical development appears faster than the social fabric. A library, for example, can become one of the first permanent public addresses where local memory begins to accumulate, people with different histories meet, and the area gradually develops its own story about itself.

In this role, the library becomes an important fragment of the city’s құрақ көрпе—not because it performs the functions of every other institution, but because it creates one of the gentlest and most sustainable ways to enter the wider system.

The Community Center: Where Opportunities Connect

A youth community center begins from a different position. Its work already brings together several types of needs: employment, career orientation, psychological and legal support, education, creativity, and the development of initiatives. This enables the center to perform an especially important function: connecting opportunities around a specific person.

After a career consultation, a participant can move on to a professional community or mentor; after an educational program, join a project team; after an open event, enter a more regular format; and, after launching a first initiative of their own, gain access to a venue, consultation, or partners.

The quality of this work is not determined by how long a person can be kept within a single institution. Sometimes the best outcome is precisely a transition—to a university program, library community, civil society organization, volunteer group, professional association, or employer.

This is how the quality of the «seam» between individual elements of urban infrastructure is tested. A memorandum records organizations’ willingness to cooperate; a working connection emerges later, when an employee knows the partner’s specific program, understands whom to refer a request to, the person actually reaches the next point, and both sides can determine whether the continuation took place.