How do you enter a city without parachuting in? And how does a hotel prove, once it has opened, that it does not use the neighbourhood as a backdrop but takes part in its life?

Prompted by OKUPA and Georges Batrouni’s thinking on hospitality as a relationship with place, the discussion examines the responsibility of a hospitality project when it settles into a city, a neighbourhood and an existing community. Before the concept, the design and the communication comes the need to understand: who lives here, what is missing, what already exists, what tensions the place carries, and how a hotel can enter this field without exhausting it.

The second part of the discussion concerns the curation of the hotel’s programme as the everyday proof of this relationship. A hotel’s experience is not designed only through architecture, interior design and service. It is also designed through what happens inside it: music, workshops, exhibitions, movement classes, food, drinks, collaborations, gatherings and small recurring occasions that make people use a space again and again.

The question is not only how a hotel opens, but how it continues to have a reason to exist within the city. Who curates its life after opening? How is a reason to return created for someone who is not staying there? How do travellers connect with residents without the community becoming a decorative narrative? And how does giving value back to the neighbourhood move from rhetoric to practice?

The discussion reads OKUPA as a test of an urban hospitality model, in which the stay, the food, the music, the programme and the people of the city together form the very reason for the space to exist.