The Belonging Index is a 0 to 100 score for how well a place is designed to foster belonging. It is built only from public data, so any building, neighborhood, or city can be scored without a survey.
And the generation that most needs places to meet is the one most on screens.
The U.S. Surgeon General (2023) put lacking social connection on par with smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
linked to loneliness and disconnection (WHO Commission on Social Connection, 2025).
on social media for the average American teenager (Gallup, 2023).
Walk Score tells you if you can reach a grocery store on foot. Neither it nor the AARP Livability Index tells a developer, a buyer, or a mayor whether a place gives people real chances to meet and know their neighbors. The Belonging Index fills that gap with the same discipline: public sources, fixed rules, a number anyone can reproduce.
Which physical conditions could support it, and can they be combined into a score based on public data that others can check?
Something builders and cities compete on, the way they compete on Walk Score today, so that the next building or block is designed to bring people together, not by accident but on purpose.
Each pillar is worth 25 points. Together they hold 26 levers, and each lever is something you can count. Tap a pillar to open it.
The score. What is built, not how people feel.
The building, the social places within a 15 minute walk, life without a car, and the streets in between.
26 scored levers, each a 0 to 3 ladder of countable physical features, never a judgment like "inviting."
OpenStreetMap, Walk Score, EPA, ParkServe, Tree Equity, crime data. Anyone can reproduce a score.
Take the parks lever. Each rung is something you can check on a map. Tap a rung.
Being close to a park says nothing about whether it is pleasant or used. The index says so openly: it measures conditions.
The pillars add up to a score in one of five bands.
The bands describe the place, not the people in it.
Architects, planners, researchers, authors, and a psychologist were interviewed for Realtopia. The questions varied, so the counts show what came up, not votes. The first four subjects became the pillars; people and programs stay outside the score.
No expert named luxury or newness, though none was asked directly.
Several of them were also interviewed.
Also: Appleyard, Livable Streets; Speck, Walkable City; Dunham-Jones and Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia; Cho, Generation Regeneration.
What design makes possible: the shared rooms, the third places, the errands within reach, the streets and green space in between. It scores what a builder or a city controls, and it can be checked from public data.
Activation: the hosts, programs, and events that get people to show up. The index does not measure whether people use a place. That second layer stays outside, so activators have something solid to build on.
She built the Belonging Index and hosts Realtopia, the interview series behind the expert interviews. Paper, rubric, and transcripts on request.