On July 16, 2026, Murmuration brought together leaders, organizers, creators, and journalists at The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice for America 251 & Beyond, a forward-looking conversation about the kind of America we want to build over the next 250 years. Across seven lightning talks exploring belonging, community, joy, identity, agency, nation, and hope, speakers Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer Sarah Stamper, Alex Johnston, Amanda Litman, Cord Jefferson, Astead Herndon, Daria Dawson, Murad Awawdeh, and Jason Green offered distinct perspectives on the people, relationships, and communities that shape American civic life. Together, their reflections challenged us to look beyond the current moment and imagine what becomes possible when we invest in the conditions that allow communities to thrive.
About Alex Johnston
Alex Johnston is the founder and CEO of Cities Reimagined, a service design firm that helps leaders diagnose and solve problems in urban places. Her work focuses on addressing systemic challenges in mid-size cities that prevent economic growth, social mobility, and human connection. Her background in business gives her a knack for developing solutions with a triple bottom line: systems that benefit people, planet, and profit.
Since founding Cities Reimagined in 2013, Alex has partnered with local government, philanthropy, and NGOs to design resident-centered systems across housing, permitting, public space, and civic participation. Her approach combines rigorous diagnosis with hands-on co-design.
Alex holds a Master's in Cities with Honors from the London School of Economics, an MBA, and a certificate in Creative Cities from NYU. She is a graduate of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Michigan, where she teaches Service Design in the Urban Technology program at Taubman College.
She lives in Detroit with her wife, in a hundred-year-old house they're renovating together.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I would love for you guys to time travel with me for just a moment. Are you up for it? Okay, I want you to, in your mind, go back and remember getting your very first library card. Yeah, for some it was a little longer than others. I got my very first library card at the downtown Orlando branch of the Orange County Public Library System. And the only person more excited than me that day, I think, was the librarian. When I walked in, I mean, I still remember. I think I must have been probably eight or nine years old. The librarian was so excited for me. She said, what kind of books do you like? And at the time, I was really into Jacques Cousteau and The Ocean. Now that terrifies me. But I remember she took me to the section where I could find books about him.
And then she told me what kind of books that she liked. And then she said, “Hey, did you know you can do all these other cool things with your library card aside from checking out books?” It wasn't easy, it was unexpected, and it was a dignified experience.
Now I want you to go somewhere else with me. Imagine that you are going down to your city's housing authority and filling out an application for Section 8 housing. Same energy, different energy? Very different energy, right? Maybe you feel like you're a suspect. Maybe you feel like somebody is interrogating you to make sure you're not committing fraud. Why do those two experiences feel so different? They don't have to.
I think at this point in the talk, we're about a minute in, you guys might be going, Alex, hang on a second. You signed up for a talk on place and belonging. Why aren't you talking about parks and plazas and public spaces? It's because those are the places that we design for belonging. We think about whether somebody feels welcome in those spaces. We think about whether somebody feels like they're part of a community when we design a park or when we design a public space.
When do we not think about that? At the permit office, at the housing authority, at a 311 customer service line. We're not necessarily thinking about how to design for belonging in those moments.
So here's my thesis. Every interaction we have with government is a lesson in how much power we have in this democracy.
So I started my career way back as a social worker right before I met Michael [Slaby, Murmuration’s Chief Operating and Marketing Officer]. And I saw firsthand the consequences of bad service design. This looked like a teenage mom and her brand new baby not being able to get through a food stamps application and then going home and being hungry for days. It looked like a family submitting an application for affordable housing, it getting lost in the shuffle, and them ending up homeless.
So the stakes are real, and the stakes are high. Since then, I have been fascinated with this question of why these experiences don't feel the same. So I've talked with hundreds of residents at this point about service delivery. And here's the conclusion that I've come to. Dignified interactions don't just build trust in our institutions. They determine what kind of citizens people show up as. It makes the difference between somebody voluntarily picking up a piece of trash. It can decide whether somebody participates in a budget hearing. It decides whether somebody may look out for their neighbor because they care about what's going on.
So the question that I'm left with is that if we feel like a burden to our institutions, why would we treat our city as something to look after? Why would we treat the polls as a place that are open and welcoming to us?
I don't necessarily think somebody wants me to be there if my government doesn't even recognize that I exist or act like I'm maybe a threat when I'm coming in the door to receive services. So there is one complication to this argument, and every good debater knows both sides so I'm gonna tell you the other side of this. And Sarah's research alluded to it.
When there is an emergency or when something feels like a crisis, people do show up. We saw streets full of people protesting after George Floyd was murdered. We saw hordes of people coming out to support Black Lives Matter.
We see voter turnout go up when a political situation or a political era feels like an emergency. But here's the issue with that. Crisis teaches us how to show up once. It doesn't teach us how to show up over and over and over in the small, everyday things. It doesn't teach us how to report a pothole. It doesn't teach us how to help our elderly neighbor get the services that they need.
The things that help us show up in the everyday are those dignified interactions with our institutions. So at this point, there are two features ahead of us.
There's one that's business as usual. We can say, it is what it is. Or we might say the thing that I heard many times in my career, as I was trying to convince people that service design matters and that service delivery matters. And they could say, if people want benefits bad enough, they'll figure it out. They might figure it out in that moment, but they're not gonna turn up to vote for you. They're not gonna turn up to a budget hearing.
So then there's the second future. There's the second future that feels like getting your first library card. You feel like the system expected you. You feel like the system wants you to be there. You feel seen and known and like this was designed just for you. So in this system, I think it is a time when we take the relationship between service delivery, democracy, and belonging really seriously. And I don't know about you, but that's the future that I'd like to live in, and it's the future that I want my kids to live in.
So I hope you'll join me in building that. Thanks.