Human-centered urban service design for an interconnected neighborhood(s) city

City neighborhoods continue to function as crucial “places” where people’s daily needs must be met and serviced materially, digitally, and spatially to maintain a healthy and sustainable quality of life. Yet many neighborhood inhabitants currently experience acute challenges of widening socio-spatial inequalities, constraints on urban mobility, chronic food poverty, poor mental and physical health, and escalating household living costs; challenges exacerbated by the long-term global effects of climate change, geopolitics, and rising energy and food costs. In response, municipal authorities and investors in many cities are seeking to implement innovative urban planning concepts and regeneration models, which integrate principles of circular and sustainable place-making into city-wide services provision. In this interdisciplinary provocation paper, we argue that evolving city-wide sustainable place-making initiatives often fail to harness the circular-regenerative and redistributive potential of interconnected neighborhoods in replenishing a city, its people, and its constituent economies and service territories. Instead, exploring themes drawn from human-centered urban service design, we introduce the concepts, principles, and key modular elements of an interconnected neighborhood(s) city to enable urban researchers, planners, designers, and cross-sector city place-making stakeholders to (re)discover, envision, produce, and activate circular and redistributive services-led urban regeneration models, platforms, and ecosystems.