Framing PLACE

This enterprise starts by making accessible decades of experience for place lovers, for people working on place improvements and place corrections, and for anyone concerned about our future in the world. There is strong evidence that a focus on PLACE and PLACEFULNESS significantly improves our well being.  PLACE-focused efforts, in decline since WWII, are often now quaint flourishes in a Digital Age march to where? Too often the endpoint is undefined or blurry.

As places around us change: the communities that shelter us and the larger regions that support them, we all undergo changes inside.  Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place

We begin with a family of three, each with relevant areas of competence: place development (Mom), Technology (Wil), and Economics (Wes). This site is building a treasure trove of hows, whys, and other tools offered through partners and professionals and those engaged in improving the ability of PLACE to foster human capabilities. People are nourished, social systems function better, when groups of people live in good places, with natural beauty, a fine built environment, and rich, interesting cultural life with lots of variety and connections between people, and that better places make for better, happier, even healthier, lives. What we are up to is understanding places, how they work, how they fail, how we can intervene to protect good places and improve bad places—and how that fosters the capabilities of all.

First we shape cities, then cities shape us.   Jan Gehl, Cities for People

There is something about us that provides a strong impetus to continue this life’s work. We are a family from New Orleans. We had a ringside seat to what happens when you almost lose the city you love. For some, place may tug at the heartstrings, for others not so much, and for still others, the frame of a place-focus seems unlikely to have impact. For any place where experiences and connections are not optimized or where resilience seems not at issue, this is completely understandable. After all, since WWII any focus on place has often been about location, not the potential for PLACEFULNESS to create a better world, place by place.

The Power of Place will be remarkable.   Aristotle, Physics

So bit by bit on this site we pull together different strands of thought about places: from architecture, planning, ecology, cultural geography, psychology, identity, urban design, philosophy, systems thinking, sociology, economics, meaning, design thinking, literature, education, brain science, creativity, ecosystems, measuring outcomes, collaboration, digital age impacts, biophilia, love of place, character of place, and other relevant avenues.

Research confirms that to develop a long-term memory the brain must contain something of the place you were in when you had the experience. Place is central to the formation of our identities.    Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to the World.

In a kind of paradox, local political efforts are increasing in a world structured by increasingly global processes. But local government is mostly organized for service delivery, maintaining order, and carrying out governmental management functions. There is a reason why so many people running for elective office claim they want to “cut the fat” out of government as they enter government service, only to find slim pickings as they become more familiar with the responsibilities. And within local governmental jurisdictions, there has been increasing meaning attached to place where personal interests reside (my neighborhood or community, my river, my view, my tree).  This can be thought of as defensive identity, a retrenchment of the known against the unpredictable, unknowable, uncontrollable.

Wisdom sits in places. Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits In Places

It is beginning to be widely recognized that we have to think about places as a whole and not just deal with “problems” or parts of a place individually. Since WW II systems science has driven “progress” in business, ecosystems, and cybernetics, but not much in PLACES. This is in part because in PLACES there is no command and control structure; instead, there are siloes: geographic, identity, fields of expertise, misrepresenting how things actually work, therefore crippling efforts to improve them. But we can change this in the Digital Age, where everything connects.

Distributed systems handle complexity not by standardization and simplification imposed from the center, but by distributing complexity to the margins. Enzio Manzini, Design When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation

This site explores Ideas, values, assets, and issues, and how to refine a collaborative approach. The future of this enterprise depends on the readiness of people to engage the content and tools in order to create better PLACES.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the ‘environmentalist view’ as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity and start calling it the real-world view.    E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

To begin using systems thinking in a place, understand systems act with purpose. In a social system that purpose is chosen by the people who make up the system. The act of choosing a future condition—what you want to be—and then realizing it is not simple, but it is essential. Start with a purpose.