Dear City Person,

Thank you for stopping by Belonging Co-Lab where I hope you will join me every month to learn about connecting with people, places, and nature in the rapidly changing cities we inhabit.

This will be a mutual journey we embark in together through exchanging reflections, resources, and personal experiments in belonging. It is not a “how-to” guide. I envision us having this exchange both privately in your email replies to my posts and publicly in your comments on my Substack posts depending on your preference should you decide to subscribe for free.

My hopes for Belonging Co-Lab

My primary aim of starting Belonging Co-Lab is to make my learning about belonging public in an age of rapid urbanization and rising loneliness, inequalities, environmental destruction, violence, pandemics, and communal fragmentation globally.

I called it a “co-lab” as opposed to just a “lab” because I want to invite you, the reader, to accompany me in my learning process instead of positioning myself as an “expert” in all things belonging. I want to invite readers to join me in embodying belonging as a practice—and not just an idea—in our day to day urban lives.

While I will be including my academic explorations, I will also be featuring non-academic ones alongside my private reflections, observations while walking, and conversations with other people on this topic.

I further hope that my newsletter will be a reference for those seeking resources on belonging and opportunities to practice it in their day to day lives—to take up space for themselves and others.

Belonging Co-Lab

Investigating together how to connect with people and places in rapidly changing cities.

By Reema Baniabbasi

Who am I and why do I care about this?

I have always had an interest in the topic of belonging especially since I grew up as an awkward nerd in the early 90s. But it was not until recently that I started to put this interest into words.

I was born and raised in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), where 80% of the population is expatriate of 200 nationalities, and lived in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, where most people come to study before settling elsewhere.

I studied and worked in Boston as a counseling psychologist trainee from 2008 to 2018 before moving back to Dubai and becoming licensed to practice at an outpatient clinic there and advising a locally-based mental health startup.

I have resigned from my job on February 28, 2025 and will be starting an MPH degree at Johns Hopkins. I am interested in how can cities help people access mutually supportive relationships especially if a lot of people don’t stay in a place for a long time. I am also interested in learning how to design and evaluate peer support programs in such cities.

During my Boston years, I mostly worked with immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, first generation Americans, and survivors of family and intimate partner violence and sexual violence. In Dubai, I work with a mix of Emiratis and expats of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds many of whom struggle with relationships, cultural identity, intergenerational clashes, and childhood or/and intergenerational trauma.

In transitioning to Boston and back to Dubai, I noticed the value of becoming familiar with both cities’ plants and animals even if I wouldn’t know all of them by name. I also noticed the simple joys of people watching and of frequenting particular places such as Northeastern University’s sacred space which became my home away from home. Grief can accompany such joys as I found out when I saw how much Dubai quickly changed in my time away. I hope to expand more on these points in my newsletter.

There were certain questions that kept repeating themselves during my clinical work in both global cities, namely:

• How can people living in cities with transient demographics connect with community?

• how can people connect with community if they are living alone or have poor family relationships or even abusive ones? What can individuals and communities do to empower them to find mutually caring relationships?

• As a mental health provider, I was taught how relationships are important for people’s physical and mental wellbeing and for resilience in the face of trauma. But what can we do when the design of a city is not built for relationships? Or when wars, environmental issues, lack of job opportunities, pandemics, gentrification, and rise in cost of living fragment whole communities?

• I have run into the concept of “community care” in Western social justice spaces as a response to how the Western wellness industry purely focuses on self care to treat problems that are rooted in larger issues. Beyond criticisms of Western wellness culture, I wonder how can we co-create community care as individuals and institutions? What is exactly meant by “community?”

These are among the many questions I hope to explore in the next steps of my career and in Belonging Co-Lab.

If you resonate with anything I have shared so far…

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Hayyakum,1

Reema