Human+Tech Week is full of conversations about embodiment, flourishing, and human-centered systems. Meanwhile the oldest, most proven flourishing technology on earth — water, warmth, shared silence, removed hierarchy — is absent from the civic stack of one of the most expensive, most stressed cities in the world. This is an invitation to build a film and a vision document during the hackathon that proposes what we should already have.
Romans knew. Japanese know. Turks know. Russians know. Finns know. Indigenous nations across this continent had sweat lodges. The form changes — caldarium, sentō, hammam, banya, sauna, temazcal — but the function is the same: water and warmth as civic infrastructure for a regulated nervous system and an unhierarchical encounter.
San Francisco is spending roughly $846 million a year on the downstream symptoms of nervous-system dysregulation and social disconnection. Wellness for those who can pay $80 a session. Crisis intervention for those at the edge. Almost nothing in between. Certainly nothing that puts those two populations in the same warm water.
"To make uncommon grounds common" — the hackathon's own framing. There is no more literal expression of that idea than a public bath.
This isn't a wellness startup pitch. It's a proposal for public infrastructure for co-regulation, encounter, and dignity — the kind of infrastructure that every flourishing civilization has built and that ours, despite the budget and the talent and the Human+Tech Week conference circuit, has not.
Over one day, with the tools and sponsors the hackathon has assembled — Blick Art Materials for the tactile, hand-made layer, and Koyal for the speculative, video-generated layer — we'll produce a 2–4 minute film that functions as a serious proposal.
Not utopia. Not a render. A grounded, embodied, multi-voiced argument for what a network of civic bath-house nodes could look like across SoMa, the Tenderloin, and beyond — with the safety, dignity, and tiered-access architecture that makes it actually workable.
The most common pushback when this idea surfaces is safety. It's the right question. The answer is that a civic bath-house can't be one room and one door. It has to be designed as a network — with tiered access, controlled environments, and private nodes for populations whose needs would not be met by a general communal space.
The same operating principle — water, warmth, dignity, removed hierarchy — can be expressed at many scales. A single room behind a clinic. A multi-room facility with separate entrances. The vacated Westfield Mall on Market Street, reimagined as a civic commons. A back room of a faith community. None of these are mutually exclusive. They are a network.
The idea resonates with almost everyone it touches. The questions that follow are real and need real answers. Below are the most common — and how we're thinking about them. The film will engage these directly through the voices we're gathering.
Safety is the central design constraint, not an afterthought. The proposal is explicitly not one large communal space serving everyone. It's a tiered network with private and clinical nodes for people whose needs would not be met by — and could not be safely met within — a general communal facility.
That means:
The Roman model wasn't "everyone in one pool." It was a sequence of rooms with different temperatures, populations, and purposes. We can learn from that.
This is the question the film is partly designed to make legible. The current $846M annual budget is largely downstream — crisis response, shelter, supportive housing. A civic bath-house network is upstream infrastructure that, if it works, reduces the downstream load. That's the policy argument.
Operationally: a mixed model — city partnership, faith-community co-investment, philanthropic funding, sliding-scale fees for those who can pay, free access for those who can't. The Roman model was funded by wealthy patrons and the state together. The Japanese sentō was a small private business knit into civic life. There's no single financial template. There are several that have worked.
Because services and infrastructure are different categories. A service is something done to someone or for someone. Infrastructure is something a city has, that anyone can use, that doesn't require you to be in crisis or to qualify. Parks are infrastructure. Libraries are infrastructure. Public transit is infrastructure. A bath-house is infrastructure.
The point isn't to add another program to the stack. It's to add a kind of place the stack is currently missing — one that pre-empts the need for many of the downstream services by addressing the conditions that create the need in the first place.
This is exactly why interfaith voices are central to the film. Ritual cleansing has a place in nearly every faith tradition — mikveh, wudu, foot-washing, baptism, sweat lodge. The forms differ, the modesty norms differ, the meanings differ. A network of nodes can accommodate this where a single facility cannot.
Some nodes might be gender-separated. Some might be clothing-optional and some clothing-required. Some might be explicitly religious in character; most won't be. The diversity of nodes is the answer to the diversity of needs.
Because Human+Tech Week is happening, 5,000 people are converging on SF to talk about flourishing and human-centered technology, and the answer is sitting in plain sight in the history of every flourishing culture on earth. (un)common ground specifically asks for art + tech synthesis in service of pressing local issues. A film made with hackathon sponsors' tools, sourced from real conversations with real practitioners, is the right artifact at the right moment.
The hackathon won't build the bath-house. It can produce the proposal that makes the bath-house imaginable to the people who can.
The vacated mall on Market Street is one of the most charged civic-space questions in SF right now. It's a vast, recently-emptied, climate-controlled space in the geographic heart of the city. Almost every proposal for it has been some variation on retail, entertainment, or housing.
A bath-house and civic commons would be a more radical and more honest answer to what SF actually needs. It's not the only option in the network — the network can start with a single room — but it's worth naming as the kind of scale this idea can grow into. The film will hold this as one node among several, not as the headline.
The film's authority comes from who is in it. Below are the conversation categories I'm reaching out to before the hackathon. If you have introductions or want to be part of one of these conversations, get in touch.
The hackathon is one day. The film is the deliverable. The roles I most need on the team: