Strength of Place

The world before Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, was a world of small silos; what you know of the heavens and the earth was what your local elders knew of it. If you were to discover that the earth revolved around the sun and write a book about it, there might be three people in your town who could read it, but perhaps only one who could afford to read it; and if he did not like it he could make it go away simply by clapping you in irons and burning your notes. There might have been 30,000 books in all of Europe, mostly ecclesiastical, mostly siloed in scriptoriums. There wasn’t really much for a common man to read; and there were few who could.

Fast forward fifty years or so after Gutenberg’s invention – and there were an estimated 10 to 20 million books; and they were much cheaper – and written about things happening all around you – industry, business, politics, science – that a common man might be very interested to learn. People started sharing their experiences and their discoveries with one another – and this cracked open all the silos of Europe. People looked around.

They began reaching out to one another across the entire continent. A discovery in Germany could be printed and read by a Londoner 17 days later. One man could speak a word and a million men begin repeating it – within days – so that even cathedrals and castles felt the seismic shocks. One man could speak, put the Sun at the center of the Solar System, and there it would stay, shining down on fifty thousand little broken-open siloes, their inhabitants squinting up into new light.

If we zoom in on Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th century printing press it looks a bit like an old wooden wine press; zoom in further and we see it holds a strange metal tray of antimony-lead chunks; zoom in still farther and now we see there are thousands of tiny characters locked in 42 parallel lines, glistening with a new oil-based ink. And if we zoom in to the top line we read,

And from here if we zoom out all the way to our present moment, we see that this strange machine unlocked a revolutionary transformation of human knowledge and cooperation.

It is one of the most significant inflection points of humanity’s story arc on earth.

If we ask, What is it that a Master-Planning Production Builder is really doing in the world?

Well, obviously, the close-up view is nail guns, framing crews and Hardie Board: we’re building houses. Perhaps not so obviously, if we back the camera way out – it turns out we are building – a lot of houses - and find ourselves amongst the foremost powers shaping the face of the third planet from the sun.

From this startling vantage point, we are de facto creators of habitat for humanity; and as with the original Creator of habitat for humanity, what we build shapes what being alive is all about. If we look up, in the center of our vision, the sky is still as He left it; but around the periphery is a new frame of cell towers apartment buildings and strip malls. As we frame the sky for the birds that still fly there, so too do we frame the heavens for the human spirit.

People live and die – inside – of what we make. And they sense it; and they hunger for something beyond that they can’t put into words. More about that later.

The upward call

The zoomed-in view leads us to think we should master production and marketing. The bigger view – calls us to master an entirely different discipline of knowledge – that is stored within the ancient cities of our ancestors – who first built habitat for humanity – from shanties and slums, through fires, wars and famines – one family at a time, over thousands of years of human experience. Their thick walls and perched plazas still mete out their ancient measures to us today, and are part of a whole domain of knowledge that governs what human beings long for in the built environment. These distinctions create what I will call “Strength of Place” and can draw people from thousands of miles away – just to come and be there.

America hasn’t had the knack of creating Strength of Place in eighty years. We can stand up whole neighborhoods, pave miles of asphalt with huge parking lots and shiny malls in weeks and months, but we rarely make places you would go to – just to be there.

Modern man is in a tough spot. Everywhere is starting to look like everywhere else – the same strip malls, the same fast food, and the same sprawling subdivisions. No one is a raving fan of any of this. We all know this. We have armies of traffic engineers who are knowledgeable in municipal codes, flow analysis and signal timing – but the more multilane stroads they engineer to take us places - the fewer places there are to go to – for some reason that completely eludes us. The more they engineer the more they erase. America is experiencing profound erasure, profound – emotional homelessness - because the massive print head of modern development is blitzkrieging concrete-asphalt-Hardie board cyphers across the landscape. We’re filling up with nowhere. It’s all nicely engineered, but completely forgettable. Everyone sees this.

We’ve mastered the engineering of getting the colossal production-housing-print-head to print – but - think deeply – what are we printing? Gutenberg printed on paper. We print across the surface of the planet. What does it all add up to? What are we actually doing here?

They want to be somewhere else – that is somewhere.

Placelessness repulses us. Picture it: A family reunion in the middle of a sprawling perfectly engineered empty parking lot. Your reaction? Repulsion. Parking lots are not places; they chafe against the purpose and experience of a family reunion. And of human life itself. Most modern streets are not places. Engineered subdivisions aren’t as bad as parking lots and usually better than being homeless, but mostly are not places either and at least mildly repulsive in nature. The richest of the rich don’t move to subdivisions. Anyone in a subdivision who suddenly received an enormous windfall of cash will move out of a subdivision. Subdivisions are engineered areas where housing product is stored in code compliant traffic patterns, with just enough landscaping and amenities for people to mostly prefer it to homelessness.

Consider five things:

1. The little Italian hilltown of Civita di Bagnoregio attracted 850,000 visitors in 2017. There are no rides and no amenities. The place itself is the amenity. The people come – just to be there.
2. Picturesque Giethoorn, Netherlands, with 2900 inhabitants, received 1.5 million visits. The place itself is the destination – and the people come just to be there – in spite of the fact that they have to share it with crowds. Think how strong of an appeal a place has to have to make you want to be there even if it means you are trapped in crowds to do so.
3. In Barcelona the locals literally march and protest to try to discourage adoring visitors of their city from coming there. 25 million actual raving fans crowded in anyway – just to be there.

All three of these places are examples of what is called, “overtourism.” Places that are so powerfully attractive to humanity that the pull is ruining the place itself. It is a sign that there is an enormous pent-up need for something that people don’t know they want – until they see it – and suddenly know – they have to go there – just to – be – there.

4. Wealthy Americans who buy expensive homes in luxuriously appointed subdivisions then pay thousands of dollars for airfare to get away from those subdivisions and spend two weeks on a limestone ridge in the shadow of a decrepit Italian hilltown like Civita di Bagnoregio. With no amenities. Just… walking around and being there. When they get home, they make plans to go again next year.

Just to be there.

5. Approximately no one from over there reciprocates in an American subdivision. Why not? Why not come over here and vacation-walk the streets of an American subdivision – with nice amenities - for two weeks? (What would your kids say after just two hours vacation-walking the streets of a subdivision – yes - even one we built?)

The reason for all of this comes down to Strength of Place.

Strength of Place is what causes people to go there just to be there. No amenities required – because the place itself is the amenity. When a place needs a special amenity building to sell the area – that is a sign that it isn’t a Strong Place; it’s an area of housing stock. In a real Strong Place – people will come and stay in houses that would hardly even meet building code in the US. But that’s not why they come. The hunger is for a real place – just to -be- .

And more than any other thing, that is the defining quality of a Strong Place.

Just being there is rewarding – without any need for amenities or special activities.

Strong places are like probiotics for being alive, and people instinctively search them out – and in fact are starving for them. When people drive into an area with Strength of Place, they can hardly wait to park their cars and explore it on foot. They feel the life inside them give a kick. They are highly sought after – and are needlessly rare; our ancestors built them all over the world.

Strong places can convey an enormous range of moods, intrigue, adventure, serenity, peace and many other experiences conducive to being alive. It’s more than dopamine. It’s like an enabler for being fully alive. People come fully awake and get a heightened sense of life itself in a strong place. Strong places pull you in – it hurts to run out of time and be forced to turn away from them. You need to go in and see – just a little further – a little further – and it never lets up. It is a destination.

Developers sometimes try to make “Destination Resorts” where people go to enjoy luxurious amenities, exciting trail systems, sports fields, and hopefully views of nature.

But once you’ve gone on all the rides, if there is little Strength of Place, the clock starts to tick and you think about going somewhere else. Of course, some natural areas can be Strong Places of their own – but then, maybe you would have wanted to stay there longer - before the resort was built than after.

Expensive amenities and zip-line dopamine don’t create Strength of Place; they just increase the amount of time you can distract yourself by doing things that modern society thinks should be part of modern life. Actual Strong Places never needed amenities to attract us and keep us coming back. Amenities do not satisfy the hunger we have for the real thing. You know it when you are there, and you know it when you aren’t.

Strong Places are inherently in demand in the market because there is only one of each. There is only one Grand Canyon. There is only one Santorini Greece. There is only one of each. If you can make one Strong Place, you automatically corner the market for it. Conversely, anyone can create an area of domiciles. With enough Marketing you can get people to go to an area of housing stock and sign mortgage papers. But you are selling a commodity at that point, and if your competition can build a similar area cheaper, people tend to go where they pay less. Hence the panicky pressure on Marketing to somehow make a commodity look like something other than a commodity.

Leading Strength of Place Developers, on the other hand, are making (right now in America) an experience that so magnetically attracts people that they have a mild version of Barcelona’s problem – they must ask their adoring public to please keep their distance for the sake of the residents. People literally buy tickets for exclusive access to come and walk through them. If you don’t have that problem, you don’t have raving fans. Areas don’t have raving fans. Subdivisions do not have raving fans. Santorini does. Danielson Grove does. Serenebe GA does. People settle for subdivisions but long for the real thing. Therein lies tremendous untapped market potential.

Our leadership is literate in production management and marketing and, understandably, tends to try to solve problems from within the domains of its own expertise. So, if people won’t come and buy homes in a Pahlisch Neighborhood, we do the only thing we know to do - better production and better marketing.

But the reality is that if you must work that hard to get people to come to an area of housing stock, the market is trying to tell you something about what you are really selling.

There’s Only One

Real estate is one of the unique product types that can be handled in a way that is impervious to commodification. Art can be truly unique – there is only one Monet, and since he’s dead, he isn’t making any new works. Similarly, Earth isn’t making any new real estate, volcanic islands notwithstanding. There will only ever be one Hood River Oregon. There will only ever be one Bend, Oregon. When handled with the distinctions of Strength of Place, real estate becomes utterly unique. When ignored, it becomes, well, a subdivision, and requires Marketing that can withstand a lot of pressure to mask that fact. There is a reason that people will pay 40% more for the same house on the West side of Bend than the East side. They are trying to get closer to something that feels like a place – and farther from something that feels like a housing tract.

Strength of Place does all the heavy lifting. It outpowers an army of marketers. If we understood the literature and mastered the distinctions of this discipline – and we only created experiences that had one tenth the Strength of Place of the little hamlet that got 850,000 visitors in one year, we’d need crowd control teams 24/7. We would have to create a Pahlisch Anti-Marketing Department. “Hey for the sake of the people who live here – please only come if you are invited or when we are selling tickets” which is, as I mentioned earlier what other Strength of Place Developers have to do - and their homes are of average size or even smaller than average size. Strength of Place does not require big expensive things. It never has.

Modern urban fabric is about as comfortable on our skin as a plastic bag.

We sense this on the shadowy periphery, but the latent meaning needs a sort of humble but firm advocacy to bring it out in front to grapple with.

When we join other leading Strength of Place developers – and bring back and integrate into our practice the ageless patterns that our ancestors created everywhere they’ve gone on earth – we will see that the places we build will do the heavy lifting for us, and our Marketing will evolve into an entirely richer form of relationships with the souls we invite to live with us. It will be a whole new level of experience. That is waiting – at the next level.

People can tell the difference when someone has put love into a physical thing –

What is inside us infuses into what we handle.

The world we build - and the paths we leave for our children to walk upon -can whisper our faith in a God whose love transforms us, or rattle chains of resignation to the unexamined concessions we made to the forces which drained us, rushed us, confused us and exhausted us.

In God’s design of the world, both our Love and unexamined Indifference inhere in the material substances we touch; and go on repeating

one message | or the other

Children yet to be born will look up at the walls we erect around them, down at the acres of asphalt we laid out beneath them, and, without understanding or knowing it, will take in the amplified meaning of it all.

They will unknowingly work out, in the story arcs of their lives, that which we amplified ten thousand times when we paved it across the face of their world. We knew it was empty.

They will, by lives of recoil or rest, register the magnitude of what they heard in our hearts, when the streets we built spoke our secrets. Our children will innocently telegraph it back to us, across all their life choices; but who will understand them in the day they do? For most of us weren’t really awake to what we did in the first place.

1. Strength of Place consulting with established and proven experts. Get the best of the best. Laurence Qamar, Casey Roloff, Ross Chapin, etc.. Design team training and master plan consulting.
2. Strength of Place training – Executive / Design team travel to, experience and train on Strong Places in the NW, then larger North America, then Europe.
3. New Urbanist and other related guilds – membership, stay up to date with advances in the field.
4. Reading list: Executive and Design level literacy in Alexander, Jacobs, Chapin, and other authors who have made significant contributions to this field of research.
5. Test integrations of Strength of Place patterns within our own developments on a trial basis with a whole masterplanned community by Qamar and Associates or on our own on an incremental basis.
6. Develop a list of indicators used to track success and begin establishing baselines.
7. Cycles of testing and refining