The City Is Alive… And Team Wonder Is Listening

“New York’s true power isn’t found in its steel and glass, but in the shared rhythms of the street.”

The artists. The immigrants. The neighbor who holds the door. The musician whose chorus stops a stranger mid-stride. These are the moments where New York reveals itself - not in its skyline, but in the invisible ties connecting the people beneath it. They are moments of wonder. And wonder, it turns out, might be the most powerful policy tool New York City has never used.

Our latest collaboration with Team Wonder documents something quietly radical: a determined effort to shift the city’s “North Star” away from bureaucratic metrics and toward a framework of collective care.

Asking a different kind of question
This film project is not a typical brand video or urban study. It doesn’t analyze statistics or infrastructure reports. While our team was asked to film two events to capture what attendees experienced during New York’s Wonder City, the resulting film is less of a standard recap and instead asks a different kind of question - one that Team Wonder has been posing to New Yorkers on street corners, in community halls, and across the five boroughs… What brings you awe? 

That question is deceptively simple. Behind it lies a body of research suggesting that experiences of awe - genuine wonder - make us more altruistic, more connected to those around us, and less prone to the divisions that fracture communities and calcify policy. Team Wonder’s bold ambition is to move government engagement from “where is the report?” to “what moves you?”
‍

Three Ideas at the Heart of the Work‍

- Awe as a catalyst. Research shows that wonder reduces division and increases prosocial behavior across communities. It makes people more generous, more empathetic, and more likely to invest in the collective good.

- Collective care. A governance model where imagination and humanity replace compliance as the primary metrics. Not “how many people showed up?” but “what changed in them when they did?”

- A visual argument. Our film captures the voices that reframe what cities are for - and who they’re designed to serve. It is an unscripted, unfiltered, alive observation of the people that make up the city.

Team Wonder is building a lens through which to see New York… one where imagination is the metric and humanity is the primary tool for change. We were honored to support in telling their story.

‍