The Living City: How Culture Takes Root in Chance Encounters

A chance meeting over coffee. An unexpected conversation between strangers. These small, unplanned moments are often the seeds from which a city’s cultural identity grows. This is the premise that shaped a key conversation at LIVEX 2026, where Bill Bragin, founding Executive Artistic Director of The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, posed a question that reaches to the heart of how communities shape themselves through creative expression.

During the first day’s programming, framed around the theme “The Human City,” Bragin explored culture not as something imposed from above, but as social infrastructure that emerges organically when people with different lived experiences are brought together. The title of his session captured this philosophy with elegance and clarity: “You Cannot Build Culture. You Have to Mean It.”

The conversation centred on a fundamental truth: cultural vitality depends on authenticity. When individuals from varying backgrounds and perspectives encounter one another, something vital happens. These meetings create the conditions for new conversations to flourish, conversations that ripple outward and deepen through the work of artists, writers, performers and thinkers. The arts become the vehicle through which these diverse voices find resonance and reach a wider audience.

Abu Dhabi’s cultural landscape offers fertile ground for such intersections. The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi stands as evidence of how intentional cultural spaces can foster genuine dialogue and creative exchange, drawing together local and global perspectives in an environment that values both innovation and meaning. The question posed at LIVEX 2026 resonates particularly in a city committed to understanding culture not as decoration or commodity, but as the very infrastructure upon which civic life is built.