The Big Sit:
the Index in the world.
The Conscious Cities Index is theory. The Big Sit is the field. Co-founded by Erin Lee and initiated on Mindfulness Day 2020 at Guoco Tower, in the heart of Singapore's CBD, The Big Sit has since brought public mindfulness to three anchor cities across three continents — testing whether intentional spaces and intentional practice, side by side, change how a city feels.
Don't just do something, sit there.
Each Big Sit is also a measurement: a way to read whether a city's public space can hold a moment of stillness, and what that stillness reveals about the place. The three anchor cities — Singapore, London, Jaipur — appear in the Index marked, not because they score highest, but because the practice has been there.
Why Singapore?
Why now?
Every index needs a baseline. Singapore is ours — not because it is perfect, but because it has put the conditions for being a conscious city in place at a depth no other city has matched. Three reasons.
The sixth
Blue Zone.
In 2023, Singapore became the world's sixth Blue Zone — the only one engineered rather than inherited. Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda emerged from centuries of unbroken tradition. Singapore got there through fifty years of intentional design.
This is the premise of the Conscious Cities Index — that intentional citymaking enables conditions for consciousness to arise.
Stewardship
as muscle.
Singapore scores second in the v1 reading, leads the Stewardship pillar (86/100), and carries the longest planning horizon in the dataset — the Concept Plan, the Master Plan, Green Plan 2030, the 30-year discipline of building forward.
The work of being a conscious city is institutional muscle here. It is exactly the discipline the Index is asking every other city to build — and rare proof that the discipline pays off.
The first
sit.
Guoco Tower, Mindfulness Day, 12 September 2020, in the heart of the CBD. The first Big Sit. The first public site of the conscious cities movement in the world. The home of XDG Labs, and the base from which every other thread extends.
The Practice pillar still has room — long working hours, high baseline stress — but the cultural ground for that gap to close is already laid.
The XID:
the operational unit of a conscious city.
An index is a reading. An XID — an Experience Improvement District — is what you build when the reading demands a response. The governance arc is clear: BIDs → IIDs → XIDs. Business Improvement to Innovation Improvement to Experience Improvement. From commerce, to creativity, to consciousness.
Experience Improvement District
Incremental. Investment-based. Anchored by creativity and innovation. Focused on the ecology of experience and community wellbeing by design.
Ultimately leading to exponential transformation. XIDs are conscious places, managed at the rhythm of people and place.
- BIDBusiness Improvement District — the commercial logic. Streets cleaned, premises managed, footfall served.
- IIDInnovation Improvement District — the creative logic. Anchored by labs, makers, and the ecology of ideas.
- XIDExperience Improvement District — the conscious logic. The full equation. Spaces × Practice × Stewardship in one place.
districtBE · Dhun, Jaipur
A living laboratory for human being. A 500-acre regenerative landscape on the edge of Jaipur — the first working XID, and the most complete physical embodiment of the conscious cities frame to date. Networks of micro-communities, bioreserves, art-craft guilds, contemplative spaces, civic anchors.
At its core: District BE — the four dimensions of being: Knowing, Sensing, Allowing, Nourishing.
Project Mandala / Jaipur300 extends the practice citywide — an ecological-cultural vision for Jaipur at its 300th year (2027). Two anniversaries in sequence: the Index turns six in 2026, the city turns three hundred in 2027.
- KnowingReconnecting with bodily awareness and intuition.
- SensingAwareness of internal and external landscapes.
- AllowingMinimal interference with experience; capacity to rest with change and discomfort.
- NourishingEasing and energising body, mind, and spirit.
Where walking along a street is about being present, more than getting to a destination."