Why is community always on a mood board? Seaside and the politics of selling belonging

This commentary engages with Teresa Brock Moneo's analysis of Seaside, Florida, exploring how nostalgia, collective memory, and idealised visions of small-town America are carefully constructed within the New Urbanist imagination. It argues that Seaside functions not simply as a planning or architectural experiment, but as a curated spatial narrative in which community, belonging, and authenticity are transformed into aesthetic and emotional experiences. Drawing on debates surrounding symbolic economy, spatial justice, and cultural commodification, the commentary reflects on the politics of designing places intended to evoke familiarity, comfort, and collective attachment. Reading Seaside through my own research on Black Caribbean neighbourhoods in London, particularly Brixton and Harlesden, the piece examines how culturally resonant spaces are frequently celebrated, branded, and aestheticised at the precise moment when the material conditions sustaining long-standing communities become increasingly fragile. In doing so, the commentary questions what is lost when the image of community becomes more valuable than the social and material conditions required to sustain community itself.