Rooms for new ideas

Daniel Okafor has long been drawn to the spaces that ask nothing of the people who enter them. We meet in a public library, where a sunlit staircase gives way to shelves, tables, and the gentle sound of turning pages.

Our conversation begins with books and opens onto a larger question: what does a community gain when it protects a place for unhurried thought? Okafor speaks about the encounters that happen between generations and the value of simply being welcome.

To make space for reading, he suggests, is also to make space for new ideas about how we might live together.