Strangers Need Strange Moments Together by Melissa Mongiat, Mouna Andraos

Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat—together with their team at Daily tous les jours—have been creating celebrated interactive art and narrative experiences for public spaces around the world for over 15 years. Their groundbreaking work is part of an emergent practice that combines technology, storytelling, performance, and placemaking to build a new infrastructure for the human spirit.

In Strangers Need Strange Moments Together, Andraos and Mongiat invite a broad range of readers—fellow practitioners, urbanists, policy makers, educators, and engaged citizens—to take a joyful approach to building resilient urban communities and re-enchanting public space. 

In times of unprecedented pace of urban growth, with increasing loneliness and division, they shed light on the importance of moving beyond purely data-driven urban planning methodologies—which prioritize productivity, efficiency, and automation—and forging new modes of public interaction. Cities must be spaces for the whimsical, unexpected, and weird, and for the wasted time and strange moments of serendipitous encounter. Andraos and Mongiat use the raw material of the “daily everyday” to propose new models of living together in the 21stcentury, and to foreground the dimensions of life that characterize what it means to be human in the first place. 

Building on the work of thinkers like Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, and Jan Gehl, whose writings on the dynamics and social life of public spaces put the focus back on humans, this book is a  journal, a series of case studies and engaging thinking.

Strangers Need Strange Moments Together by Melissa Mongiat, Mouna Andraos, Set Margin’s Publications, 2025