Purpose-led design for a mission-driven foundation

The Humane Urbanism Foundation is a non-profit organisation that helps cities recover from and prepare for extreme conditions such as disasters and conflicts in ways that put people first.

Born from the response to the 2023 earthquake in Hatay, Türkiye, Humane Urbanism brings together communities, city leaders, designers, academics, institutions, funders and people on the ground when systems are fragmented or overwhelmed.

For Humane Urbanism, recovery means looking beyond the visible damage. Cities are made from infrastructure, but also from memory, culture, trust, relationships and daily life.

In Hatay, the pressure to rebuild was immediate, but the deeper task was to help the city recover in a way that respected the people who lived there, the histories they carried and the future they needed to build.

When the team came to Mission Creative, the foundation had already done significant work on the ground. What it did not yet have was a public presence that could explain that work with the clarity and care it deserved.

The challenge was partly practical. Humane Urbanism had a large amount of material, from reports and project documentation to partner input and internal thinking. It needed to be shaped into something clear, useful and easy to navigate.

There was also a deeper narrative task. The team needed to crystallise the story they wanted to tell and express it in a way that felt serious, humble and human.

The website had to help Humane Urbanism become more visible without making the work feel self-promotional. It had to show authority without sounding like a top-down institution. It had to carry emotion without using suffering as a visual shortcut.

Most importantly, it had to reflect the way Humane Urbanism works: through connection, community and collective action.

The project began with listening. Before we could design the website, we needed to understand the foundation’s role, its origin story, its audiences and the sensitivities around how the work should be represented.

Through interviews, collaborative UX workshops and working sessions with the Humane Urbanism team and ING Media, we began to identify the story beneath the material.

The central theme was connection.

Humane Urbanism’s work depends on bringing people together who would not always naturally sit in the same room. Recovery can be slowed by competing agendas, complex governance, fragmented funding and the emotional pressure of disaster. Humane Urbanism creates a shared space where communities, experts and institutions can work through those pressures together.

That sense of connection became the organising idea for the website. The site needed to show that Humane Urbanism is a network that helps people move from fragmented effort to shared action.

The UX process translated that idea into a clear structure.

We created a content architecture that helped visitors move from purpose to proof. The experience needed to answer simple questions quickly: who Humane Urbanism is, what it does, how it works and why its approach is needed.

At the same time, the site needed enough depth to support different audiences. A potential funder, city official, NGO, architect, journalist or community partner might all arrive with different questions. The site had to give each of them a clear route in.

The second theme was balance.

The name itself carries a useful tension. “Humane” speaks to people, memory, culture and lived experience. “Urbanism” speaks to systems, infrastructure, planning and resilience. The website needed to hold both sides together.

Too much focus on the technical side risked making the work feel remote or institutional. Too much focus on emotion risked flattening a serious recovery model into familiar charity language. The right answer sat between the two. This duality shaped the journey through the site.

From there, we moved into visual design. The design direction needed restraint. Humane Urbanism already had powerful content and a serious mission. The role of design was to make the work easier to understand, feel and trust.

Photography played a central role. Image selection had to show the scale of destruction and recovery, while also staying close to the people and communities affected. Aerial images helped communicate the size of the challenge. Ground-level photography brought the story back to daily life, memory and lived experience.

The same thinking shaped the use of typography, colour and layout. The site had to feel crafted, but not over-designed. Serious, but not cold. Human, but not sentimental.

Humane Urbanism needed to feel professional enough for funders, civic leaders and institutional partners. It also needed to feel open, warm and grounded enough for the communities and collaborators at the heart of the work.

True partnership.
This project was a real joy to work on. Humane Urbanism brought clarity, openness and decisiveness to the process. The team understood the sensitivity of their work and trusted the process enough to move quickly. ING Media, Humane Urbanism’s long-term communications partner, helped bridge the project with calm and thoughtful guidance. Together, we built the project in much the same way Humane Urbanism approaches its own work: by bringing the right people together, listening carefully and moving with purpose.

Launched to coincide with Urban Future – The Better-Cities Event in Ljubljana, June 2026 the website gives Humane Urbanism its first clear public platform.

It moves the foundation beyond a holding page and gives partners, funders, collaborators, journalists and civic stakeholders a stronger understanding of who Humane Urbanism is, what it does and why its model is needed.

The new site establishes Humane Urbanism as a serious, thoughtful and human organisation with a distinctive role in helping cities recover from and prepare for extreme conditions. It shows the value of connection, community and collective action, while creating a platform that can grow into a broader resource for knowledge, tools, learning and project evidence.