We can come to understand a place by thinking of its dynamics as similar to the way many different aspects of one person’s identity come together and interact in a personality, by which we mean everything that makes a person—or by analogy a place—distinctive or even unique. When we do that, we find ourselves addressing a place as a complicated interactive system, an ecology if you will, and we are more like gardeners than like mechanics when we try to improve places. Places can reasonably be said to have personalities, as complex and interesting as those of people. We must work with the place rather than simply impose our will on it. It matters what seeds we plant in what soil.
Places are living systems, and systems are tricky things to change. Everything in a system is interrelated with everything else. Systems are resilient. When you attack a system at one point you may be affecting something else you haven’t even considered. And the system may react in such a way as to undo what you do as fast as you do it. Systems turn around and bite you when you least expect it. The integrity and resilience of systems is related to their complexity—and systems that are so complex that they can be personalized, thought of as having a personality, are especially difficult to address. When you approach trying to improve a place (an extraordinarily complex system) you have to do it carefully and respectfully, with full awareness of the difficulty of the process and the risks of unintended consequences.
On this website you will find an approach to places that is holistic and humanistic, and helps us to broaden our view, and look again at the places we care about. If we do that, we will realize that what people love most about places—their distinctive personalities, their character of place, their individuality, the qualities that tie us to them with bonds of affection and compel our lasting attachment to them—have been outside our field of vision when we approach places as professionals trying to make them better—and often when we approach places as citizens engaged in our communities.
Creating better places in which to live our lives is as much art as it is science—and we put blinders on when we chose to ignore that. We need to combine a sense of place—in fact a rich awareness of the character of place—with disciplined knowledge and practice, in a new model of seeing, knowing, and doing that is responsive to the way complex systems actually work. We need to bring to our interaction with human places the best insights that are emerging around us in whole earth ecology, in land use management, in business, in education, and in science.
This is hardly a radical idea. It is obvious, even self-evident. But it is also a fundamentally different way of seeing places, and it changes everything.